The Visionary Academy of Ocular Mentality: Atlas of the Iconic Turn 9783110706109, 9783110695199

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THE VISIONARY ACADEMY OF OCULAR MENTALITY

LUCA DEL BALDO

THE VISIONARY ACADEMY OF OCULAR MENTALITY ATLAS OF THE ICONIC TURN

Contents

Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 W.J.T. Mitchell Introduction The Visionary Academy of Ocular Mentality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Horst Bredekamp Introduction The Warburgian Tradition and Bildwissenschaft . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 Portraits and Essays A–Z . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 “Conversation Piece” Luca Del Baldo & Andreas Beyer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 447 Index of portrayed persons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 457

Acknowledgements

My project The Visionary Academy of Ocular Mentality / Atlas of the Iconic Turn took me a long time, about ten years, and there are many people to thank, distinguished scholars and friends who have given me precious suggestions. First of all, Rick Brettell and the Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History at the University of Texas at Dallas, who funded the publication of the book. W.J.T. Mitchell and Horst Bredekamp for their wonderful introductions to the whole project, and Andreas Beyer for our “Conversation Piece.” Arthur C. Danto and David Carrier for their sincere friendship and encouragement to persist on my troubled path. Then, of course, all the participants who, more or less, had many words of esteem and generosity with me in our continuous discussions via email. My thanks to Mieke Bal, Barry Schwabsky, Donatella Marelli, Stephen Bann, Svetlana Alpers, John Yau, Joseph L. Koerner, Slavoj Žižek, Ivan Gaskell, Martin Jay, Marco Livingstone, Samuel Delany, Daniel Dennett, Michael Ann Holly, Norman Bryson, Richard Shusterman, David Summers, Martin Kemp, Keith Moxey, Giovanni Perlini, James Goddard, Maurizio Radice, David Freedberg, Gary Schwartz, Andreas Huyssen, Stephen Greenblatt, Jonathan Brown, Salvatore Settis, Christopher Finch, James Clifford, Donna Haraway, Jacques Rancière, Catherine M. Soussloff, Vincenzo Trione, Tiziana Andina, Hans Belting, Jean-Luc Nancy, Joachim Pissarro,

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Arthur Wheelock Jr., Semir Zeki, Barbara Maria Stafford, Ruth Millikan, Peter Burke, and Richard Shiff. Many thanks to those (professional photographers or not) who gave me their photos: Lawrence Schwartzwald, Anne Wagner, Michael Baxandall, Mike Wilfling, John Semlitsch, John Baxter, Beate Söntgen, Leo Freeman, Stéphane Mitchell, Gunter Glücklich, Rod Stoneman, Miguel Corella Lacasa, Alessandra Moctezuma, Linda Rosenkrantz, Rebecca Jay, Tucker Bay, Elliot Krasnopoler, Leo Freeman, Uwe Dettmar, Leo Gaskell, Susy Hogness Dennett, and David McDowell. And last but not least, Katja Richter and Susanne Drexler of De Gruyter, for the patience and great care taken in editing the book. I dedicate this book to Arthur C. Danto, Rick Brettell, and my father, Tarcisio Del Baldo. Como, May 2020

Editorial note The authors’ texts are published without major modifications. In order to keep as much of the original character as possible, only minor standardizations were made.

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W. J. T. Mitchell Introduction The Visionary Academy of Ocular Mentality

The human face is the most powerful and paradoxical object in the field of visual perception. It is the site of parental imprinting in infants, an automatism we share with many animals, and the sight that provokes what Jacques Lacan called “ the Mirror Stage” of self-objectification. It is, as Emanuel Levinas taught us long ago, both the factual and figurative location of our ethical relation to Others. It enjoys the status of transparent immediacy (the face to face encounter) and is therefore the organ of the deepest deception and dissimulation in the form of masks, makeup, the poker face, and the “ bald-faced lie.” It is the sacred icon of honor and reputation, and therefore something we can lose, the object of defacement, caricature, and disfiguration. It is something we are born with, and yet, as George Bernard Shaw insisted, the thing we are responsible for by the time we are forty. Given its centrality, we might expect the portrait of the human face to be the most important genre in the visual arts. But from Roman busts to oil portraits to the selfie, portraiture has remained a minor genre compared with mythical and historical compositions. Its association with vanity and temporary celebrity has done little to elevate its status, and the current explosion of surveillance technology has reduced the human face to a data file in societies of control. Facial recognition software renders the face little more than an identity card linked to a “ data double” that renders privacy a quaint, obsolete memory. George Orwell

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concluded his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four with a nightmare vision of totalitarian power: “ If you want a picture of the future, ima­gine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever.” In the midst of this dark picture of the human visage, Luca Del Baldo has proposed a counter-strategy of celebrating a group of scholars whose work provides a contrary vision of vision itself. The Visionary Academy of Ocular Mentality is centered around a band of contemporary scholars who have devoted their lives to the iconic or pictorial turn, expanding the domain of art history into the larger domain of visual culture, and elevating the study of visual images into parity with the study of language and literature. Beyond this central group Del Baldo has drawn in representatives of a larger cohort of scholars who have provided new visions of human possibility in politics, sexuality, and history. Members of the Visionary Academy investigate vision in both its literal and figurative sense, as a study of optical technologies and perception on the one hand, and the boundless field of human understanding and imagination on the other. Scholars such as Michael Ann Holly, Griselda Pollock, and Norman Bryson who have inspired the study of visual culture are here, along with pioneers of art history like T. J. Clark and Svetlana Alpers. Philosophers like Judith Butler and Arthur Danto rub shoulders with Gayatri Spivak and Jacques Ranciere. Historians of the “ anti-ocularcentric prejudice” (Martin Jay) appear alongside ethnographic critics of the “ ocular mentality” such as Johan­ nes Fabian. And the German triumvirate of Bildwissenschaft, Horst Bre­ de­kamp, Hans Belting, and Gottfried Boehm are included to insure that the field of “ image science” comes face to face with itself. Anyone who studies this gallery of well-known scholars might come away with the impression that this an academic version of Andy Warhol’s array of silk-screened celebrity portraits. But the fact is that very few of the people depicted here will be recognizable to the general public; their “celebrity” is pretty much confined to the academy, where they are known principally by their writings, not their faces. And if Warhol’s silk-screened portraits emphasized the mass circulation and repeatability of the faces of Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe, Luca Del Baldo renders his portraits in the medium of uniqueness and singularity, oil painting on canvas.

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Del Baldo’s method of assembling his Visionary Academy flies directly in the face of the contemporary reduction of the portrait to a data blip in societies of spectacle and surveillance. Returning to the medium of thickly applied oil paint, at a scale roughly life-size, Del Baldo paints his gallery of scholars in a thick impasto that catches every blemish, wrinkle, and scar with unerring accuracy. His method combines fidelity to the mostly aged faces of his subjects, with a precise attention to the surface of his 11”X15” canvases. The result is an intimate close-up well beyond the capacities of photography, in which the hand of the artist has touched every freckle and pore, and hinted at the soul captured in a fleeting expression, a turn at the edges of the mouth, a peculiar glint in the eyes. The paradox is that none of these portraits were made “ from the life,” but were based on photographs – in my case, a digital selfie – sent to the artist by email. The artist works from these photos which, significantly, are nowhere to be found in this album, but consigned (as Roland Barthes noted) as “ refuse . . . to the drawer or wastebasket.” (93) If the original photos, as Barthes also insisted, bear the punctum of Time (“ that is dead and that is going to die” 96), the paintings conjure the faces back to life. The visible touches of paint, the heavy impasto Del Baldo employs, are like the traces of a counter-cosmetician, healing the blemishes by marking and enhancing them, defeating Time by re-tracing it in the gestures of the artist’s own hand. This is partly because, as a keepsake, the painted portraits are much more valuable in their singularity than the photos on which they are based, much more likely to survive as family heirlooms than the innumerable digital photos that clutter data clouds and forgotten hard drives. If photography drained what Walter Benjamin called the “ aura” from the faces of the academicians, Del Baldo brings it back in the precious, lovingly applied brushwork of these painted portraits. Of course we have to admit that in the form they are reproduced in this book, that whole process of re-animation has been re-interred in photographic reproductions. The paintings are now mainly consigned to private places – the wall of a study, an upstairs hallway, at best at discreet location in an academic office. The only signs of life will be the words of the subjects, commissioned by the artist in exchange for the gift of his painting. The whole circuit of exchange between artist and scholars in this book is a kind of hyperbolic potlatch, the competitive

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giving of gifts. Del Baldo asks no payment for the intense and protracted labor he invests in each portrait, only the recompense of a few words. The minimalist response is provided by Noam Chomsky, whose seven line response is really a refusal to respond. The maximalist is offered by Mieke Bal’s learned meditation, “ Allo-portraits: Collaboration Between Mirror and Mask” complete with eleven footnotes, taking us far and wide into the phenomenology of the face and the history of portraiture. Between these extremes, the Visionary Academy ranges over personal revelation and theoretical speculation, confession and confident appreciation. Del Baldo saw something in the writing of every one of these scholars that impelled him to ask them for a photograph of their face. He turned down the first one that I sent him, a professional photographer’s close up of my face in a café in Palermo taken after several glasses of wine. I was mugging for the camera, trying to impersonate a famous photo of Michel Foucault glaring at the photographer. Wrong proportions, said Luca, and so I sent him a selfie that leaves me cold. I love Luca’s rendering, but dislike the original on which it is based, uncertain whether this is a failure or triumph of narcissism. So what does The Visionary Academy of Ocular Mentality amount to, finally? Certainly it is a completely original venture in the long history of transactions between art and learning, painting and writing. No artist that I am aware of has tried something so ambitious and selfless with such devotion and skill. When one thinks of the hours that each of these portraits has required, the patient labor and attention required, one has to be astonished by the stubborn persistence of the whole project. The members of the Visionary Academy certainly have a lot to be thankful for, including the generosity of Luca’s request that their only payment for these exquisite renderings of their faces be a few well-chosen words. The result is a unique and profound conversation between image and text focused on the enigma of the human face in all its mediations.

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Horst Bredekamp Introduction The Warburgian Tradition and Bildwissenschaft

The Necessity to Reflect on the Picture The worldwide Corona crisis in 2020 is a challenge for all sciences. As if in time-lapse footage, the material for a huge field study has emerged not only for virology and epidemiology, but also for psychology, sociology, and, not least, image science. In the way the pictures are currently used and reflected and their functions renegotiated lies the key to a pictorial understanding of the crisis. The efforts to limit the infections around the world to the point that the capacities of health systems were not overwhelmed were based on complicated extrapolations and models. They were given visual form in a pictorial graphic whose conveyance with the accompanying motto “flatten the curve” guided action worldwide. At the same time, photos of overflowing intensive care wards in Bergamo and of mass burials worldwide circulated and were shared by the millions on social media; without them, the measures that in some cases interfered drastically with basic civil rights could hardly have been enforced. In the months of Spring 2020, the digital possibilities of communication received a spur like nothing since the introduction of the Internet in 1992. Digital conferences – in which, via the pixels on the computer screen, groups of individuals were connected into communities, like the body of the Leviathan, the image with which in 1651 Thomas Hobbes envisioned the archetype of the state – expanded the paths of commu-

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nication, and in this way, instruction at schools and universities became a great theater of living portraits. The lasting form of a representation that lacks the haptic quality of touch underscores, on the other side, the unsurpassable significance of the argumentation of the body, the direct gaze, and sensitive matter. The painter Luca Del Baldo could not have known any of this when he began creating his series of likenesses, the “Academy of Ocular Mental­ ity”, almost 20 years ago. And yet, the disposition of his undertaking aimed at the question of representing the human being in a picture, as has become clear in the most recent crisis with its possibilities and deficits. He took the rise of the picture to the center of communication in the 1960s with the development of the mass media in print, televi­ sion, and the pictorial digital media as the occasion to transfer to painting the representation of people as achieved by photographs. He thereby employed the material and bodily experienceable, individual and original level that arises when the model and the painter enter a relationship. The calculated irony of his series, however, lies in the fact that his likenesses do not arise directly and are not similarly experien­ ceable, but are imbued with a doubled alienation effect via photography and its transference into painting. The material, physical picture thus presents itself as a medium of transformations that occur through the character of these transfers. With that, the “Academy” series aims at a return of portrait painting that does not regress to pre-modern culture, but that places the genre of likeness in the center of the reflexivity of the picture in itself. The Iconic Turn Del Baldo has devoted his philosophical painting to the concept of the iconic turn, which has given a name to and inspired the profound method­ological changes in the humanities and natural sciences that have been developing for about half a century. This slogan goes back to the art historian and philosopher Gottfried Boehm. In 1994, as the introduction to his highly influential book “Was ist ein Bild” (“What is a picture”), he published an article about the “return of the pictures”, in which he introduced the term iconic turn to describe the picture’s entrance to the central area of hermeneutics and philosophizing as an autonomous instance of its own.1 With an eye to the visualization of

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large areas of communication, this formulation was a call to methodologically sharpen the pictorial means of analysis in every field and in every medium in which pictures are present, whether statically or in motion. In the context of the cultural shift from text to picture and under the motto of the pictorial turn, in 1992 W.J.T. Mitchell had already tried to update Erwin Panofsky’s iconology.2 Mitchell, Boehm, and with them a large number of researchers wanted to encounter the increased importance of pictures art-historically and philosophically in critical correlation with the linguistic turn that Richard Rorty hat proclaimed in 1967.3 Mitchell performed the concept of the picture as a pseudo-living entity,4 and like no other, he is predestined to introduce this book from the viewpoint of the English-speaking world. The Return of Bildwissenschaft It is no coincidence that the term iconic turn emerged from the starting situation in the German-speaking world. Since about 1965, in the course of increasing reflection on the crimes of the Nazi regime, a younger generation of art historians was confronted with the fact that, along with musicology, art history was the discipline with the highest percentage of forced emigration from Germany. My generation had to learn that with these personalities outstanding achievements in methodolgy were more or less lost sight of. The recovery of this continent of knowledge and methodological diversity was a specific reason why the generational, and with it epistemological, struggle was carried out comparatively bitterly and lastingly. The basis for this was the study of the biographies of more than three hundred art historians who emigrated, mostly to the United States and the United Kingdom.5 The essential conclusion drawn from the methods that were developed in the Weimar Republic and have been recovered since the 1970s lay in Aby Warburg’s conviction that no realm of design is unworthy of art-historical research. In particular via Hamburg’s Warburg Library of Cultural Sciences, which was able to emigrate to London in the fall of 1933, the path was open to de-hierarchalize the materials and fields of art-historical concern to the point of including the analysis of popular art and the visual products of political propaganda. One of the essential sources of inspiration, along with the Hamburg School, was the Vienna

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School, especially in the person of Alois Riegl, became a kind of bible of a material-historical and societal-historical art history.6 It was through him that there was a direct perception of Walter Benjamin as an art historian. Benjamin had repeatedly called Alois Riegl one of his intellectual predecessors in calling art history one of the leading disciplines during the Weimar Republic.7 Benjamin’s statement was strong motivation to recover what led him to this judgment. The art historians conference in Cologne in 1970 marked the watershed beyond which art history became a discipline that newly fulfilled Warburg’s ambition to be “pictorial historians” in the broadest sense under the criteria of the present. At the center stood the section of Martin Warnke, Das Kunstwerk zwischen Wissenschaft und Weltanschauung (The work of art between science and worldview), in whose course, among other things, the demand arose to expand the discipline’s methods to cover all visual media, including even advertising and methods of mass media communication.8 The decisive long-term effect can be seen in the fact that, since then, art history regards itself once again as an image science into which social science, neuroscience, anthropology, media history, political iconography, and the iconology of material have all found entry. This is especially true also of the natural sciences, which for quite a while have applied a great degree of aesthetic innovation to grasp and convey their often invisible objects. The aesthetic brilliance of, for example, medical imaging, molecular biology, and nanotechnology shows particularly well that it would be an understatement to speak here solely of “illustrations”. As a rule, pictures not only reproduce the results they depict; they also shape and produce results out of themselves.9 Because it took all these fields into account, this tradition of art history as Bildwissenschaft defends the unity of image-science in its most unhierarchical sense.10 Considering the phenomena they attend to, the validity of the pictorial and iconic turns has never had the character of a fad; rather, they continue to be effective as a broad reflection of the concept of the image in extremely diverse disciplines and the most diverse cultures, for which the researchers brought together in this volume provide the best evidence. The concept of the picture that Gottfried Boehm applied to human artifacts and that the philosopher John Michael Krois extended

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to non-human entities11 was expanded at the international CIHA Conference in Nuremberg to include the “object”12 and at the German Art Historians Conference in Göttingen in 2019 to the “thing”.13 This cleared the way for a definition that overcomes the boundary between what is biological and what appears to be dead matter. The concept of active matter possesses a deeply image-relevant character standing at the end of a development already implicit a hundred years ago with Aby Warburg.14 The Painted Space of Reflection These topics can be heard in the commentaries of the researchers gathered in this “Academy”. Luca Del Baldo has produced a painted space of reflection, as illuminated in the interview with Andreas Beyer, published as a conclusion at the end of this book. It is no coincidence that this painted building stands prima facie in an Italian tradition. It takes up the Illustrium Imagines, which, in the style of the ancient portrait collections, found canonical form through Andrea Fulvio in 151715 and, in various editions including a collection of likenesses of scholars from 1577, through Paolo Giovio.16 These collections served to honor important individuals, but also the prestige of the matter itself, and in this, they were more than an homage to reputation. But there was and is the danger that the medium of the portrait can become an organ of self-stylization, and, possibly for this reason, Georges Didi-Huberman, who developed Aby Warburgs impetus further in the French-speaking realm like no other, did not take part. But it can be observed throughout that, for their part, the commentators reflected on this danger. Some contributions contain things that, not being actual any more, are all the more reflexive. For example, Hans Belting writes that his book on “faces” is still being worked on. It deals precisely with the object that Del Baldo had in view. Meanwhile published, it reads today like a meta-commentary to the “Academy”-book.17 Del Baldo did not choose the rigor of profile depictions as found in the Illustrium Imagines. By relating his paintings to photographs, most of which were taken frontally, his paintings lack the strictness of the profile line of most of the Uomini illustri-series, but he is all the more able to reformulate the hope, inherent also in these historical likeness series, that the portraits are able to speak for themselves.18

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1 Gottfried Boehm, Die Wiederkehr der Bilder, in: Was ist ein Bild? (ed.: idem), Munich 1994, p. 11–38. 2 W. J. T. Mitchell, The Pictorial Turn, in: Artforum, 1992, March, p. 89–94. 3 Richard M. Rorty, Metaphilosophical Difficulties of Linguistic Philosophy, in: The Linguistic Turn (ed.: Richard M. Rorty), Chicago and London 1992 [1967], p. 1–39. 4 The foundation was laid in his publication: What do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images, Chicago 2005. 5 Karen Michels, Transplantierte Kunstwissenschaft. Deutschsprachige Kunstgeschichte im amerikanischen Exil (= Studien aus dem Warburg-Haus, Bd. 2), Berlin 1999; Ulrike Wendland, Biographisches Handbuch deutschsprachiger Kunsthistoriker im Exil. Leben und Werk der unter dem Nationalsozialismus verfolgten und vertriebenen Wissenschaftler, 2 vols., Munich 1999. 6 Alois Riegl, Spätrömische Kunstindustrie, Vienna 1901 [reprint Berlin 2000, with an afterword by Wolfgang Kemp]. 7 Walter Benjamin, Strenge Kunstwissenschaft, in: Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. III, Kritiken und Rezensionen, Frankfurt am Main 1972, p. 363–369 (first version), p. 369–374 (second version); Wolfgang Kemp, Walter Benjamin und die Kunstwissenschaft, Teil 1: Benjamins Beziehungen zur Wiener Schule, in: Kritische Berichte, Bd. 1, 1973, No. 3, p. 30–50; Teil 2: Benjamin und Aby Warburg, in: Kritische Berichte, Bd. 3, 1975, No. 1, p. 5–25. 8 Martin Warnke (ed.), Das Kunstwerk zwischen Wissenschaft und Weltanschauung, Gütersloh 1970. 9 The Technical Image. A History of Styles in Scientific Imagery (eds.: Horst Bredekamp, Vera Dünkel, Birgit Schneider), University of Chicago Press, Chicago/London 2015. 10 Horst Bredekamp, A Neglected Tradition? Art History as Bildwissenschaft, in: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 29, 2003, No. 3, p. 418–428. 11 John Michael Krois, Für Bilder braucht man keine Augen. Zur Verkörperungstheorie des Ikonischen, in: Kulturelle Existenz und symbolische Form. Philosophische Essays zu Kultur und Medien (eds.: idem and Norbert Meuter), Berlin 2006, p. 167–190; idem, Image Science and Embodiment or: Peirce as Image Scientist, in: Kompetenzen der Bilder (eds.: Ulrich Ratsch, IonOlimpiu Stamatescu, and Philipp Stoellger), Tübingen 2009, p. 201–215. 12 The Challenge of the Object. Die Herausforderung des Objekts. 33. Congress of the International Committee of the History of Art. 33. Internationaler Kunsthistoriker–Kongress Nürnberg, 15.–20. Juli 2012. Congress Proceedings (eds.: G. Ulrich Großmann and Petra Krutisch), Nuremberg 2013. 13 On this, see: Kilian Heck and Iris Wenderholm, Zu den Dingen! XXXV. Deutscher Kunsthistorikertag, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, 27–31 March 2019, in: Kunstchronik 72 (2019), p. 88–99, and Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, vol. 83, no. 3. 14 +ultra knowledge & gestaltung (eds.: Nikola Doll, Horst Bredekamp, and Wolfgang Schäffner), exh. cat., Leipzig 2017. 15 Andrea Fulvio, Illustrium Imagines, Rome 1517. Cf. Milan Pelc, Illustrium Imagines. Das Portraitbuch der Renaissance, Leiden/Boston/Cologne 2002, p. 8, 69–72. 16 Paolo Giovio, Elogia virorum literis illustrium, Basel 1577. 17 Hans Belting, Faces. Eine Geschichte des Gesichts, Munich 2013. More recently, the tradition of the series of likenesses has been taken up again in the form of the fourteen portraits of researchers joined in 2000 as Fellows at the Collegium Budapest and painted in profile by the artist Anke Doberauer (David Craven, Anke Doberauer Series for Collegium Budapest: An Historical Profile of the Neo-Humanist Portrait, in: Collegium Budapest. Institute for Advanced Study, Newsletter, Spring 1998/1999, p. 22–24). 18 Pelc 2002, p. 56f.

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Svetlana Alpers

Dear Luca, your project is impressive ... My problem with it is that I do not like the tone in which most of the individuals you have worked with write about themselves – it seems to me to be too self-important, too much fuss about the individual – what I admire those people for is not a photograph of them, but the work itself. The final chapter of my book Roof Life ( in French Tuilages) is titled Self-Seen. I begin the chapter by considering two photographs of myself taken by my companion Michael Baxandall (dead 10 years now) – what interested me was not how I look but how I was seen by Michael. I believe in the words I wrote about those pictures .ever Svetlana On my desk, to the right of where I sit, there are two small photographs. They are propped up against a strip of wall in the narrow space behind the pencil box of pale wood brought back from a trip to New Zealand by one of my sons. That shadowed strip of wall, along the arm of the I-shaped desk beneath the high wall of book shelves, is layered with bits of paper. Phone numbers, addresses, postcards, some resonant words printed out from friends’ e-mails and more are all tacked up. The photo­graphs are not of family or friends. They are photographs made of me by M. It happens that they both were taken from the same distance and angle – the face seen close-up in % view from the left and slightly below,

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body seen to the waist in a black top, eyes looking to my right. I have gotten used to myself in that expanded profile, hair pushed back, the further eye and cheek glimpsed beyond the large nose, a shadowed crease leading down from it to the corner of the mouth, the line of the jaw interrupted by a bit of loose flesh. In the photograph at the right, the arms are raised, hands behind head, elbows jutting out from sleeves pushed up, back resting against the curve of a white plastic chair with a blur of garden leaves beyond. In the left one, the face and neck in bright light stand out above the v-neck of a black sweater before an interior wall faintly seen. People often don’t like how they look in photographs. But what does that mean? How do you know how you look, or what you look like – an odd phrase that is. When I look to the right and see the photographs, that is me. There I am as seen, known and the point is, made known to myself through M’s eyes. The face in the photos doesn’t smile. It is at rest, set, but in a relaxed way, conscious perhaps of being observed. Disposed to being looked at, let’s say. M. is there indirectly too, in the record of how he saw me after lunch sitting in a chair in the garden of the gite at Dracy and again a year or so later stan­ ding in twilight in the splendid 18” century salon of the apartment in Dijon lent us by friends. 2019

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Ernst van Alphen The Portrait as Battleground

Usually when I see a photograph of myself I feel alienated from the person I see in the image. The image I have of myself does not the match the photographed face I am facing. For a second, I cannot believe that that person is me. It is not that I do not recognize myself; but there is slight, uncanny mismatch between the image of myself which I have internalized, and the image outside of myself, which I am looking at. It is familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. This is the case for photographic portraits of myself. A painted portrait has never been made of me, until Luca Del Baldo painted my portrait. It is first the time that I see a portrait of myself that does not have the effect of uncanniness on me. How can that be? It suggests a difference between photographic portraiture and a painted portrait. In order to understand this difference, I will first say a few words about the reflections on portraiture by the French cultural critic Roland Barthes and by the British painter Francis Bacon. In his Camera Lucida Roland Barthes has written about the nature of the relation between portrait and the portrayed.1 In his view the image has a strong hold over the subject through the ability to represent the body of the subject as whole, an ability that the subject lacks. For the subject has only transient bodily experiences and partial views of its own body. To transform these fragmented experiences and views into a whole, the subject needs an image of itself.

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Barthes, however, does not see the dependence on the unity and form-bestowing relation with the image as desirable, but as mortifying. “ I feel that the photograph creates my body or mortifies it, according to its caprice.” The subject loses itself when it is objectified in represen­ tation. This loss of self is brought about because the objectification of the subject that bestows the experience of wholeness on her or him is a discursive transformation that translates the subject into the terms of the doxa. The subject falls prey to a representation that constructs it in terms of the stereotype. So, according to Barthes, in the portrait the subject is not confronted with itself in its essential quality, but, on the contrary, by becoming an image it is alienated from itself, because assimilated into the doxa. Hence, Barthes’ view on the portrait is highly ambivalent. One depends on portraiture for the illusion of wholeness, but at the same time one has to pay for that by a loss of self. One’s image is always cast in terms of the already-represented. Barthes needs the portrait and resists it, which makes the portrait into a battleground. Barthes’ account of the relationship between representation and subjectivity as a discursive conflict enables us to see the disturbing quality of Francis Bacon’s portraits as efforts to unsettle the kinds of representations of the self that mortify any experience of the self. In interviews Bacon’s incessant emphasis on the need for distortion in order to represent the “ real” appearance of somebody can be understood as a fight against stereotypical representations of the subject. In interviews Bacon talks about his portrayals as conflicts between the artificiality of representation and the resistance of the model to that artificiality. “FB: What I want to do is to distort the thing far beyond the appearance, but in the distortion to bring it back to a recording of the appearance. DS: Are you saying that painting is almost a way of bringing somebody back, that the process of painting is almost like the process of recalling? FB: I am saying it. And I think that the methods by which this done are so artificial that the model before you, in my case, inhibits the artificiality by which this thing can be brought about.”2 Bacon talks about his portrayals as conflicts between the artificiality of representation and the resistance of the model to that artificiality. That which Bacon depicts is exactly the fight between subject and representation. He folds the subject back onto itself, endorsing the resulting

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fragmentation as the inevitable consequence of this denial of the unity-­ bestowing power of representation. Although at first sight, Bacon’s paintings have little in common with the painting Luca Del Baldo has made of me, also Del Baldo’s mode of painting demonstrates the artificiality of representation, of painting in this case, Bacon is talking about. My image is not “ caught” or “ mirrored”, but is artificially built up by means of paint and brushstrokes. The building stones that artificially construct my face are emphatically visible. As I result, there is not one single moment of (mis)recognizing myself. Instead I admire an artificial construction that is me. 2018

1  Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, translated by Richard Howard. (London 1982: Fontana). 2  David Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon. (London 1987: Thames and Hudson), p. 40.

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Marc Augé Regard

Étrange sensation: il m'est arrivé, comme à tout le monde, de me reconnaître sur une photo, mais jamais je ne m'étais surpris à me sentir l’objet de mon propre regard. Ici aucun moyen de lui échapper. Non qu’il soit particulièrement vif ou inquisiteur: il ne me cherche pas, mais, face à lui, je sais qu’il m’a trouvé. Il faut dire que dans le portrait de Luca Del Baldo il n’y en a que pour lui. Le peintre a pris pour modèle une photographie publiée dans un blog de recherches anthropologiques, et il y a ajouté de la matière: la peau du visage est moins lisse, plus colorée, plus chargée de plis et de taches. On pourrait être tenté de dire qu'il m'a vieilli. Mais je crois surtout qu'il a voulu mettre en évidence le regard de celui dont il étudiait la photographie, moi en l’occurrence. Comment peint-on un regard? Je ne sais, mais le résultat, pour moi, est troublant. À mi-hauteur de la toile, les yeux accaparent l’attention. Ils se situent entre l’espace clair du fond detableau, sur lequel s’inscrit, avec le blanc de la chevelure, la pâleur du front dégagé, et sa partie basse, aux couleurs plus marquées: menton mal rasé, bleu de la chemise, noir du bracelet – montre en cuir. Ils ne reflètent a priori qu’une pensée vague, vaguement contemplative, mais ils expriment un état d’âme ou d’esprit qui devait être le mien quand la photographie a été prise; je me trouve soudain au centre du tableau et d’une énigme dont je suis le seul à pouvoir éclairer les termes. Le regard, on serait tenté de dire qu’il estintérieur, intime, réflexif, mais c’est moi qui le regarde!

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J’ai les yeux verts, mais, si j’y regarde de plus près, cette impression se décompose; il y a un peu de bleu, dans ce vert-là, et quelques reflets d’un marron doré. En outre une source lumineuse inconnue allume quelques flammèches à l’ombre des paupières. Au total, j’ai l’air très sérieux, un peu fatigué peut-être; la main qui soutient le menton accréditerait cette hypothèse, même si l’on ne voit pas la pointe du coude qui étaye l’ensemble. Dira-t-on qu’influencé par l’air du temps, je suis sinon inquiet de notre situation globale, au moins préoccupé par certains de ses aspects? Honnêtement, je n’ai pas le souvenir du moment où la photo fut prise et jene suis pas certain, en outre, que mon regard ait eu la même expression sur la photo originelle que sur le tableau de Luca Del Baldo. Et pourtant il s’agit bien de mon regard. Le peintre a su capter quelque chose que la photo ne révélait pas. Je me fixe dans les yeux et, au bout d’un moment, je comprends: la vie passe vite, mais le temps ralentit parfois; nous nous arrêtons pour la regarder passer avec un peu de nostalgie apparente mais aussi le sentiment que tout est dans l’ordre des choses, et s’ébauche alors, du haut des yeux jusqu’aux confins des lèvres, l’esquisse d’un sourire. 2018

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Oskar Bätschmann My Short Career as an Artist

When I was a boy, I received a box of oil paints from Amsterdam’s Talens for Christmas. From then on I practiced oil painting by copying all kinds of colored illustrations including the “Wetterhorn” by Joseph Anton Koch after a reproduction in a magazine. At eighteen I enrolled in the local arts school for courses that took place in the evening or on school-free afternoons. I learned to draw from living models and we practiced on a very thin old man and a rather stout woman. After two years of military service, I fled to Italy and enrolled at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence. I was accepted into the class of Professor Primo Conti, who was a very famous painter at the time. The lessons were remarkable because we painted every morning until 1 p.m. from Monday to Saturday and the professor came on Saturday at 11:30 a.m. to greet us. He said very kindly: Ciaò Oskar, vieni domani al tè. He owned a beautiful house in Fiesole and was married to an English woman who made wonderful tea. Teaching in anatomy, life drawing, printing, and art history took also place as was the case for a traditional art academy. My best friends at the academy were Elia Li Gioi from Avola in Sicily and Anna from Livorno, who was unfortunately already engaged. Elia was the most talented of all of us and gave me the instruction to paint stilllifes like Giorgio Morandi’s. Nevertheless, I spent more and more time in the Uffizi Gallery. I then returned to my hometown of Lucerne and I participated at a few exhibitions. I was unsuccessful and had to admit

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that I was no more talented than the others. This judgment prompted me to end my short career as an artist and I began studying Art history, German literature and Philosophy at the University of Zurich. It turned out to be a good decision. I admire David Freedberg’s essay Against Portraiture. Indeed, the alienation in front of one’s own portrait is already predetermined with the discovery of the image by Narcissus. He kept his portrait as a representation of a stranger and this is in the history of the portrait more important than any other aspect of the legend. In fact, each portrait of yourself, whether painted or photographed, is the work of a stranger, even a self-portrait with the help of a mirror. What can we recognize as our own in a portrait? I think it’s the expression. From a great distance, Luca succeeded perfectly in expressing my friendly irony. 2019

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Mieke Bal Allo-portraits: Collaboration Between Mirror and Mask I see all people behind their masks. Smiling, peaceful faces, pale and silently hurrying along a weaving road where its end is the grave. Edvard Munch1

Does a portrait present us with the person depicted – a ’likeness’? That remains to be seen. The portrait is a classical genre. The genre of portraiture is usually discussed without reflection on the affiliated genre of the self-portrait. I will argue that in the fissure between these two, we can see the most characteristic feature of both: the presence of otherness. The term “ allo-portrait” can thus be deployed to think about both. They are equally strongly anchored in the representation of a face. What allo-portraits have in common is the questioning confusion of self and other – a confusion conducive to thought. This is the basis of their philosophical relevance. That variety alone undermines the humanistic certainties regarding the face, its depth, and its individual uniqueness. Many portraits are self-portraits, and some of the greatest artists – Rembrandt, Munch – are near-obsessive self-portraitists. Yet, there is one key difference between the two genres: the primary tool of the self-portrait is the mirror, which is entirely irrelevant in portraiture. Portraiture, on the other hand, is based on what the artist sees. This may be the friendly face of someone he or she knows, but it may also be, and has often been, the way the sitter wishes to be immortalized. That is, at least, the premise of most studies of the portrait. Perhaps the last classical account of this classical genre is Richard Brilliant’s 1991 book on the subject, which entirely rests on those premises that the twentieth century portrait has vehemently rejected.2

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Edvard Munch, in the scribble that is my epigraph here, sees the portrait more as a mask – which is hiding, rather than revealing, whatever “ essence” – personality or character – a person might possess. In accordance with my view that later art “ remakes” older art, in the sense that the latter cannot be seen without the screen of the former modifying what we see, contemporary or more broadly, modern art changes the portrait, even the much older instances of it. In an essay that is crucial for the understanding of modern portraiture, Ernst van Alphen dis­ tinguishes portraiture from common presuppositions. One of those is the affiliation, in classical depictions, with royal, noble, and bourgeois self-importance; another is the mimetic or realistic presupposition, the idea of likeness; a third is the idea that portraits capture a person’s essence. Van Alphen alleges many important portraitists from the twentieth century who all, in different ways, undermine these classical notions. Instead, as the final sentence of the essay has it: “ Portraiture as a genre has become the form of new conceptions of subjectivity and new notions of representation – a genre that does not take its assigned place in history but embattles what history has naturalized” (2005: 21-47).3 But what is it that history had naturalized, but shouldn’t have? A discussion of the authenticity – or not – of self-portraits by Rembrandt in the double-voiced catalogue with the exhibition Rembrandt / Not Rembrandt, held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1995 in New York, sheds light on the relationship between portraiture and self-portraiture on the basis of the concepts van Alphen and the artists he discusses, emphatically reject. Some of the paintings included in the Rembrandt exhibition were self-portraits. The discussion of these demonstrated that the definition of that genre, as all genre definitions, affects judgments of value and decisions of attribution, of authenticity. Briefly put, the “ self” of the face and the “ self” of the hand are merged, as if they were of a single interest. There lies the presupposition I would like to use as a wedge. For example, in volume II, curator Walter Liedtke wrote about a beautiful self-portrait from 1660: “ Rembrandt here reveals an extraordinary ability to describe physical qualities (which presumably were studied in a mirror) and simultaneously to suggest character” (1995: 76). This statement nicely sums up what the standard view of self-portraiture stipulates as features of the genre: description

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as mode, mirror as tool, and self as subject, the latter being conceived as character, inner self, or personality, readable in facial features. What passes unnoticed is the theory of the face this implies.4 Van Alphen’s view that the modern portrait corresponds, rather, to new conceptions of subjectivity can be taken to allude to, or at least, to include Lacan’s famous brief but crucial explanation of the function of the mirror-stage in the formation of subjectivity. Rather than bringing the viewer or painter closer to the self, the mirror alienates from the self. Distance, reversal, and, most of all, seeing your own face as other, produce the estrangement that makes full subjectivity possible. In other words, the authenticity debates are based on the pre-mirror stage, the pre-symbolic imaginary. Genres consist of the self-evident definitions people “ think in” or “ live by” rather than of well-theorized categorizations. (Self-)portraiture is no exception. Because we think we know what a portrait is, we don’t question the notion of whether there is enough theoretical substantiation for such a category.5 It is a further note by Liedtke that is the occasion for my approach to portraiture in this brief essay. The curator quotes a remark by Joshua Bruyn that demonstrates the need to revise the classical conception. Bruyn is quoted to have said that in this picture “ only the face is by Rembrandt.” It is a profoundly intriguing remark that puts on the table the intersection of the two issues of authorship and genre, which are at the heart of any discussion of (self-)portraiture. I shall retain the place of the face in this remark. Incredibly, and apparently on the basis of this opinion of the then-leader of the Rembrandt Research Project, Christian Tümpel de-attributed the painting and catalogued it as “ Circle of Rembrandt.” Given that in the nineties, the possible de-attribution of The Polish Rider also centered on the autograph face versus allo-graphic rest, this decision on Tümpel’s part is an astonishing but potentially important contribution to the discussion of the centrality of the face in figurative art in general, and (self-)portraiture in particular. Liedtke’s remark about the artist’s accomplishment would predict his disagreement with his colleague. At stake is not only the contestable issue of coherence, but more precisely, the centrality of the autograph face as a distinctive feature of the genre of self-portraiture. This centrality, plausible as it may seem, is not “ natural” enough to be accepted without some reflection.6

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The face is not simply a part of the human body. It is the one that facili­ tates connections between people and thus constitutes the interface of sociality. The face is, in this sense, both over-estimated and under-estimated. In order to get out of the kind of discussions in which Bruyn was able to make such a farcical even if at the same time, potentially profoundly productive, because so contestable, judgment of authenticity, and based on which, in turn, Tümpel was able to deprive the public by dis-attributing the painting, I propose to focus on the performativity of the face – the way it acts. This allows us both to consider self-portrait and portrait together, and to avoid essentialist views of what the face “ expresses”. For this I shift for a moment to the significant verb “ to face”. To face is three acts at once. Literally, facing is the act of looking someone else in the face. It is also, coming to terms with something that is difficult to live down by looking it in the face rather than denying or repressing it. Thirdly, it is making contact, placing the emphasis on the second person, and acknowledging the need of that contact simply in order to be able to sustain life.7 This view leads completely away from the mirror (tool for self-portraiture) and, or versus, the mask, as a tool for sitting for portraiture, withholding self-revelation, replacing it with self-presentation. It makes the distinction redundant. If we just assume that the self-portraitist also poses – wears a mask – since he or she presents the self self-consciously for a public, the mask is just as relevant as the mirror. And the disputes in Rembrandt scholarship make more sense when we consider, in terms of facing, the possibility of that intermediate genre, the selfportrait made by someone else, commissioned or not. In both cases – of the doubted self-portrait and the overly-posed portrait, hence, a portrait of another, whether or not the features on the painting resemble either the sitter or the artist – we can call the result an “allo-portrait”. This would be the reverse of Leonardo’s famous claim that all painting is, unconsciously, self-portraiture.8 I would like to complement this view with the thesis that all portraiture is allo-, in relation to the self as well as to other sitters, even in the case of self-portraiture, and hence, that a self-portrait commissioned from another artist, or done by students, deserves the genre label as much or as little as an autographic one. Between the hand and the face, and the performativity of both, they would have, inevitably, aspects of auto-

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and aspects of allo-. An instructive example of the commissioned self-portrait is the photographic self-positioning of the run-away, then emancipated American slave Fredrick Douglass, which he systematically (had) made, and which he used to put forward his political argument for emancipation. Prefiguring the later view of subjectivity mentioned above, he poses for the camera, stages himself the way he wants to be seen – the Munchian mask – and thus shows himself and hides himself at the same time, in the same image. The many photographs, as numerous and emphatically “self”-oriented as the self-portraits of Rembrandt and Munch – two instances I happen to have studied – cannot be generically distinguished from the autographic self-portraits that constitute the basis of the genre.9 In a study of Goya, Tzvetan Todorov gives two further indication that, I think, support my attempt to integrate the two genres. One is the caricature. Todorov writes that the fact that the caricature distances the subject from his habitual self allows the image to become truer, since “ the mask tells the truth that the deceptive façade of the naked face hides”. The caricature “ simplifies and amplifies the features of the face in order to makes visible what one tends usually to keep secret”. (64) Eliminating redundant features and deploying hyperbole, the artist is better equipped to reach the truth of the person, rather than judging them subjectively, as caricatures tend to do. In a slightly different vein, later in the book the author praises, precisely, the recognition of the subjectivity of the look. But then, he is discussing the self-portraiture, which in Goya’s case is a remarkable contribution to muddling the genre waters. Not only are his self-portraits amazingly devoid of narcissism, but also, one of his most beautiful self-portraits show the artist/sitter being attended to, with tenderness, by someone else. (275) Thus, with portraiture, self-portraiture, caricature and what is more easily seen as a genre painting, we must face that allo-portrait, paradoxical as the notion is, seems the best proposal for a wider, more encompassing conception of portraiture.10 Where does this leave the kind of portraits Luca Del Baldo makes? His fine painting makes them entirely “ auto-” in terms of his “ hand” – they are most surely autographic. With “ fine” I am emphatically not alluding to the so-called “ fine painting” of utter realism in the seventeenth century, but to a combination of artistic and technical “ finesse” – a thin

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(fine) brush stroke that nevertheless significantly doesn’t hide itself. The sitters are other people, but selected by the artist; that is already one step in the merging of self and other. Moreover, the portraits are based on photographs made by other hands, different from each sitter. But the sitters, or subjects, select the photographs. Hence, they choose a likeness to themselves; one they like. Given that choice they make, the photograph with its resemblance to the sitter, comes close to the mask Munch wrote about. Auto- and allo- move around, and it becomes impossible to distinguish them. This allows other aspects to come to the fore. The faces we see in Del Baldo’s collection are first of all just that: a collection. And the elements in collections, as distinct from arbitrary storage, have something in common. In this case, it is the profession they share: the study of art, and hence, the knowledge and insight in, among many other genres, portraiture. The remarkable, and confusing feature is that each portrayed face belongs to a person who will recognize the other faces, since they are all colleagues, meet in conferences and other professional events. With the verb “ recognition” I bring in another half-baked characteristic, this time of the act of looking. Looking (at art) is a mixture of recognition and innovation. Both are necessary. Without recognition, an image cannot mean anything. Without innovation, art becomes wall-­paper. As a consequence, we are compelled to look at the way Del Baldo has performed his task. Armed with a paint brush, his hand has made something else, something allo-, of the photograph, and thus the resul­ting portrait challenges the reliance on recognition. It depends on the viewer; but it is possible to contemplate these portraits stroke by stroke, looking at color nuance and juxtaposition, and feel the confusion, al­most annoying, that recognition places in the way of such contemplation of the surface and texture of the paintings. The tension between the two, recognition and novelty, or better, between figuration and paint work, I have term “ surface tension” in a study on Munch’s emphatic brushwork that counters the realistic, biographical clichés that viewers tend to bring to the art of this over-exposed artist.11 Let’s face it. Perhaps we should give up on, or at least relativize the distinction between portrait and self-portrait, between portraiture and other forms of painting, between autographic and allographic paint work, and abandon the genre label altogether. Like the identity of sit-

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ters when the portrayed person is famous, a genre label makes us jump to conclusions, and turns the recognition itself into a mask, hiding the art work. Between the face and the hand, the artist’s eye is more strongly influential for the resulting artwork as the face, and eye, of the sitter is for the recognition. A collaboration between sensations – the reassurance of recognition and the excitement of surprise – makes such distinctions futile, even untenable. Collaboration: as among colleagues, such as this merry bunch of art historians. Collaboration: not similitude, but a respect of differences. 2018

1  Ms in Munch Museum MM T 2547, quoted in Woll (1993: 33). For an extensive analysis of Munch’s practice of, especially, self-portraiture, see Jon-Ove Steihaug, “ Edvard Munch’s Performative Self-Portraits”, 12-24 in Guleng, Mai Britt, Brigitte Sauge and Jon-Ove Steihaug, eds. Edvard Munch: 1863-1944 Oslo: Munch Museet, Nasjonalmuseet for kunst, arkitektur og design / Milano: Skira Editore S.p.A. 2013, and my own study on Munch, Emma & Edvard Looking Sideways: Loneliness and the Cinematic. Oslo: Munch Museum / Brussels: Mercatorfonds; Yale University Press, 2017. 2  A classical study on the portrait is Brilliant, Richard 1991 Portraiture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Attempts to move beyond that view can be found in Woodall, Joanna (ed.), Portraiture: Facing the Subject. Manchester, 1996: Manchester University Press. The term allo-­ portrait was first used by Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe 1979 Portrait de l’artiste, en general Paris: Christian Bourgois (91) and developed more by Hirsch, Marianne 1997 Family Frames: Photo­ graphy, Narrative, and Postmemory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press (ch.3).

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3  Alphen, Ernst van 2005 “ The Portrait’s Dispersal”, included in a volume of his essays, Art in Mind, How Contemporary Images Shape Thought. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press (21-47). 4  Liedtke, Walter, Carolyn Logan, Nadine M. Orenstein, and Stephanie S. Dickey, 1995 Rembrandt/Not Rembrandt in the Metropolitan Museum of Art: Aspects of Connoisseurship. Vol. II: Paintings, Drawings, and Prints: Art-Historical Perspectives. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art / Harry N. Abrams. 5  In this sense, genre concepts are like those “ metaphors we live by” theorized by Lakoff and Johnson in their book Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1980; 1999). On the mirror stage, see Jacques Lacan, “ The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience.” In Ecrits: A Selection. Ed. and trans. Alan Sheridan, 1-7. New York: W.W. Norton (1977). 6  Cat. Nr A 73. Tümpel is among the most eager de-attributionists of Rembrandt paintings, surpassing the Rembrandt Research Project on this respect. 7 I have developed this view of facing on an article on a video installation based on it. See “ In Your Face: Migratory Aesthetics.” In The Culture of Migration: Politics, Aesthetics and Histories, edited by Sten Pulz Moslund, Anne Ring Petersen and Moritz Schramm. London: I.B. Tauris, 2015, 147-170. 8  See Zwijnenberg, Robert (1999). The Writings and Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci - Order and Chaos in Early Modern Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 9  For an in-depth discussion of the case of Douglass see chapter 2 in Ernst van Alphen, Failed Images: Photography and Its Counter-Practices, Amsterdam: Valiz 2018. 10  Tzvetan Todorov, Goya à l’ombre des lumières. Paris: Flammarion, 2008. The self-portrait by Goya that lacks all narcissism, and I would add, comes closer to caricature than to self-portraiture, is the 1820 painting Self-Portrait with Arrieta, at the fine Arts Museum in Minneapolis. 11  I have developed this concept in order to foreground Munch’s radically innovative mode of painting, that tends to remain unseen or undervalued, due to an overdose of biographical information. See chapter 10 of my 2017 book Emma & Edvard Looking Sideways: Loneliness and the Cinematic. Oslo, the Munch Museum / Antwerp, Mercator Fonds / New Haven, Yale University Press.

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Stephen Bann

I have a prejudice against photography. To put it more precisely, I have been arguing for a long time against the cultural pressures of what I call ‘photographic exceptionalism’. This could be defined as taking the ‘invention’ of photography to have been be a decisive development in visual communication which not only dominated the future but has also now come to infiltrate our understanding of the past. Thirty-five years ago, I started writing about Ruskin in The Clothing of Clio. I then explained how his reaction to his surprise discovery of the Daguerreotype, which he described metaphorically as tantamount to experiencing Venice as an ‘enchanted land’, was closely akin to the claim of an eighteenth-century instrument of miniaturised reproduction, designed to ‘bring all paradise before your eyes’. Photography ‘aroused no absolutely new types of response’, or so I fondly claimed. Now that Ruskin’s bi-centenary is already upon us, I hope to be showing shortly in a paper on ‘Ruskin and Photography’ how he was in fact passionately engaged in the whole range of print techniques which had burgeoned in the mid-nineteenth-century: among them, steel engraving, colour lithography and mezzotint, all of which were employed to specific purposes in the grandiose achievement of the first edition of Stones of Venice. Scant attention is now paid to this rich medley. When I recently reviewed Antony Griffiths’ compendious study entitled The Print Before Photography, which has a notional finishing date of 1820,

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I suggested that a more appropriately angled title might well be: The Print Before Photography (Distorted History By Retrospectively Branding Prints As Reproductive). The myth of the ‘original’ print (indeed misleading as so many of these signed and numbered ‘originals’ are now produced by photo-mechanical processes) tends to devalue retrospectively the work of the centuries up to the nineteenth when it was the engraver’s task to apply an aesthetically fine system of graphic transcription to the visual forms devised by painters and sculptors. Much of my writing over the years has also been concerned with reviving an interest in the works of Paul Delaroche, who was posthumously branded as having greeted Daguerre’s invention with the melodramatic exclamation: ‘From today painting is dead!’. Unfortunately, it is never possible to prove beyond any doubt that a person did not say words that are commonly attributed to him. But a large part of my research effort has been devoted to showing how such a remark (derived from a flimsy later source and implausibly backdated) is not at all in accordance with what can easily be discovered about Delaroche’s awareness of (and nuanced reactions to) the new medium. That Delaroche was well aware that photography would ultimately put the reproductive engravers out of business is beyond doubt. But you might think that these zealous harbingers of tradition had already succumbed by 1840, if you followed the received accounts of nineteenth century visual culture up to very recently. I made a bid to resuscitate this forgotten world, in two studies, Parallel Lines (2001) and Distinguished Images (2013). I conceived by the way a great fascination with the work of the late nineteenth-century engraver, Ferdinand Gaillard, of whom the high-priest of photographic triumphalism, William Ivins, wrote that ‘his ideal was ‘a sort of handmade daguerreotype’. Of course, Gaillard was well aware of photography. He most probably used photography as a basis for some of his most stunning portrait prints. But it is precisely the fact that these prints are not actually ‘photographic’ - the fact that they are worked over so sedulously and minutely by the engraver’s tools - that gives them their undoubted visual authority. When the photograph that lies behind Luca Del Baldo’s portrait was taken, I was briefly in Galway in the West of Ireland to deliver a short talk on the work of the British/Australian painter, John Beard. John had installed two vast and complementary works at opposite ends of an

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enormous shed on the harbour-side of the city. Both were in fact black and white transcriptions of Théodore Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa. They reproduced the actual size of the original painting, first shown at the Paris Salon of 1819, which had afterwards travelled in the form of a duplicate copy to be exhibited in London and Dublin. The first of these two works by Beard bore the traces of having being painted, while the second was a direct reflection of its forerunner, produced by photomechanical means. Beard also produced an ink-jet print which based on the initial painted version. What I particularly admire about the way in which ‘photography’ pervades this project is the fact that the process is by no means obvious in the different stages of reproduction that constitute the two-part work. The materiality of 3 paint, and the memory of another painting, jointly hold our attention The work as a whole also demonstrates, but is not dominated by, the phenomenon of the photographic registration of light. The circumstances in which my own photograph was taken for this collection, and the way in which the new painted image has emerged, remind me of another recent experience. For a considerable time, I have carried around with me the memory of viewing Paolo Paolini’s haunting Young Man Looking at Lorenzo Lotto. This is, I should explain, Paolini’s photographic version of a small portrait of a young man by the Lombard painter of the Renaissance. The title serves to instantiate the original artist, so to speak, as the object of the perceived gaze of the model. At a recent exhibition of Lorenzo Lotto’s work in the National Gallery, London, I was delighted to discover the ‘original’ painting there in front of me. But of course I immediately associated it with the direct address to an onlooker that is evoked in Paolini’s revised version. Perhaps something similar has been taking place as I have followed the successive stages of the preparation of Luca’s portrait. An original photograph (which was in fact snapped in July 2017 beside the bust of Maecenas in the grounds of Coole Park, Galway) has metamorphosed into: Elderly Art Historian Looking at the Former Director of the Irish Film Board. Luca’s painting subsumes this new message, while providentially relocating me in the company of my old friends and colleagues. 2019

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Zygmunt Bauman

Huge thanks, dearest Luca Del Baldo, for sharing with me the wonderful tributes your portraits, deservedly, mustered from your sitters. If only I could express my gratitude to you and my admiration of your art by writing something at the same level of erudition and expertise ... I am not, alas, up to the task! Yours forever in debt - Z. 2010

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Hans Belting

My resistance to comment on my portrait is explained by the fact that I am presently writing a book on face and mask. In my view, the difference between face and mask should be reconsidered. The face is to some extent also a mask, a mask of the self. Nietzsche, in his essays on “ Jenseits von Gut und Böse”, even claimed that we need a mask to remain or to become ourselves. In your case, you have produced without knowing me in person, a portrait after a snapshot posted in the internet in 2000, and turned it into a painting which I only know from the digital reproduction. What then is it what I see? My expression is or seems spontaneous, and I have forgotten when and in which context the photograph was taken which you used. I smile in your portrait but why and to whom? Maybe, I have changed since, as we always only remain ourselves on the condition that we change. In my manuscript for the book I even suspect that we only represent the self, since we aim at and exercise, or avoid, such a representation. Thus, my hesitation to write about what I see ( and what it is what I see or don’t see), may be the only reaction which is more than a play with empty words and questionable ideas. In the meanwhile, I continue to write a chapter on the portrait in my “ history of the face” and I claim that what in other cultures was the mask, in the European tradition has become the portrait as a place holder, but a placeholder for what and for whom? 2012

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Andreas Beyer How do you recognize a world-famous scholar?

The virtual academy that Luca Del Baldo is composing is based upon the essen­tial principle of the portrait: the absence of the model. The effigy is always representative. In the strict sense of the term: the image occu­pies the place of the one who is not there. Already Leon Battista Alberti knew about this specific characteristic, when he encouraged his contemporaries to mold the faces, the heads of one’s friends in clay, in order to be surroun­ded by them even though they might be distant. And so, in the splendid isolation of his atelier on lake Como, the painter is encircled by an increasing series of personalities that are important to him: authors, philosophers, historians of art. People that work and write on the power and force of the image, that represent the ocular­ thought. I do not know, if anyone of them has ever personally visited the atelier. Usually the painter solicits photo­graphs and chooses the one that in his eyes comes closest to what he has learned and deduced from the persons writings. He then transforms the chemical trace of the photographic surface in a pictorial gesture, in a styl­is­tic cipher, proper only to him – a virtuosic translation, interpretative, becoming steadily more independent. But the photos on which Del Baldo relies are, commonly, taken by others. I do not think that anyone has sent a selfie – only the most audacious would have done so. This means, that the authors are already two. Like me, also most of the others will have asked a confidant to take the picture. A person of trust, of whom you

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can be sure that you will be looked at with affection, sympathy, even tenderness. But the camera works according to its own technical rules, which means that another “ author” comes into play. And since one postures, attitudinizes, tries to appear in the most appealing (or: authoritative) manner in front of the lens, also the model claims its part of the ”invention”. The paternities of the portrait are hence multiple. Although the brush of the artist, his choice of the detail, the colors, the light, his hand determine its final apparition more than anything else. So what do we see? Whom do we see? We are always inclined to read in faces. The pseudo-science of the physiognomy, from Giambattista della Porta (De humana physiognomia, 1586) to Johann Caspar Lavater (Physio­ gnomische Fragmente zur Beförderung der Menschenkenntnis und Menschenliebe, 4 vol., 1775–78) has encouraged generations to deduce from the individual traits and features the character of the person, his virtues and his defects. But the German naturalist, mathematician and virtuoso of aphorism, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799), has reminded us early that “ We judge hourly from the face and we err hourly” (Wir urteilen stündlich aus dem Gesicht und irren stündlich.) It was the premonition to be at fault, to abuse, to derive risky speculations from the facial features. The physiognomy in fact represents the dark side of the Enlightenment – the “ hygiene of the race” has exploited it merciless. It seemed pertinent to me to recall this chapter also in front of Luca Del Baldo’s illustrious gallery. Not only numerous instances are involved in the genesis of these portraits – what makes them the result of just as many personal (or technical) interpretations. The “ essence” of the model is covered by multiple stratifications. Every portrait is the sum of varied perspectives, fixed in an ultimate gesture by the artist. And every canvas is the result of different dialogues that made it originate. The last and certainly most decisive being that with the painter himself. Aligned in the artist’s studio, a new colloquium develops among the pictures. But it is an artistic conversation. A debate on the capacities, but also on the limits of portraiture, and one on the artist’s sovereignty. And on the explanatory power of the face. Because we should not cherish an illusion. We should remain skeptical also in front of ourselves. There is an anecdote that is precious to me, and not only because I am a resident of Basle. When the Swiss cultural historian Jacob Burckhardt – then already well-established as the author of the Cicerone and The Civ-

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ilization of the Renaissance in Italy, what generated an increasing require-

ment of diffusible images of him – was encouraged by his family to have his picture taken, he put on his Sunday suit and resorted to the local photographer in Basle. After knocking at the studio’s door, he asked the Photographer to be portrayed. That declined the wish, explaining: “ Today that’s impossible, unfortunately. We await a world-famous scholar.” 2018

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Harold Bloom

Dear Luca, I am considerably thinner after many illnesses. Here is a very short comment: Going on eighty-eight, I continue to read, write, and teach. I will go on until the end. My mental battle is to preserve canonical values in literature and in thought. I will not cease from this mental fight. 2018

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Gottfried Boehm A Singular Gaze For Luca Del Baldo

The oft-discussed experience that images are not only things but also seem to look back at us applies in particular to the portrait, which brings the human gaze itself into play. But what is a gaze? And what is it when it confronts us, materially embodied, in a painting? The viewer first sees the ovals of the eyes, which belong, with regard to their form, color, and position, to the physiognomy of the face. But they are at the same time the origin of an energy that emanates from them, spreads out, and turns outward, an energy that is capable of dominating a person and a painting with its presence. Many museums provide examples of this, but this visual intensity has become so self-understood that it usually goes unnoticed. Only when we pay heed to the difference present in the work – a difference that opens up between the fact of the eyes and the effect of the gaze – do we begin to understand that we are participating in a noteworthy transformation. The inanimate physical constitution of a painting appears as something else, as the animate psyche of the person represented. The gaze functions in this transformation as a catalyst, and the painter learns to organize the alchemical processes of the image. Portraiture is also about being faithful to the reality of the represented person, about expressing characteristic aspects of her appearance within the pictorial field through painterly (or other) means. And it is always about capturing the represented person in her vitality. The verb capture reflects how the target is

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moving, is only situational, and that means the goal can be reached in different ways. What becomes manifest in the end – and this is an important criterion of portraiture – can best be described in a paradox: it is about a similarity of the represented person with herself. This similarity can be achieved through different styles, modes of expression, and manners of painting. Similarity does not follow any objective norm but rather a living more-or-less, even when a popular misunderstanding considers sameness to be the most ideal mode of similarity. But a portrait can never be the same as the represented original. These preliminary findings make one curious to investigate the role of the gaze in more detail, particularly since energies are by nature invisible and changeable, and only show themselves indirectly. For example, no one has ever seen the force of gravity, but we are all familiar with its effects on the visible world and on ourselves. One would actually confound any viewer if one asked her to indicate the place of the gaze in an image with her finger. What techniques does painting have for setting the transitory gaze in motion? This magic of seeing already preoccupied the ancient world, which invoked and explored it in myth and often spoke of evil or good eyes, of gazes that can turn those who look at them into stone and of other gazes that can bear witness. As different as their effects prove to be, what ties these gazes together is the fact that they all have to do with a power. The myth of the hundred-eyed or even thousand-eyed Argus proves to be particularly profound in this regard; it is about the deathly fate of the gaze. It is not coincidental that G. W. F. Hegel recalled it and inserted it into his Aesthetics (trans. T. M. Knox, Oxford 1975, vol. 1, 153– 54). The figure of Argus seemed so exemplary to Hegel that he derived a model for the work of art from Argus’s existence. Argus’s eyes cover the entire surface of his body, granting him the ability to see everything, an all-encompassing attention that nothing can evade and that is never overcome by sleep. Hegel was not interested in the narrative tension of the Argus myth, including Apollo’s tricks, which operate beyond sight and to which Argus succumbs in the murderous climax of the story. What fascinated him instead was the forceful magnitude of the gazes embodied in this figure and their piercing intensity. He transfers this to the artwork, whose status has since been often described with the metaphor of the hundred-eyed Argus. It is even present when not

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explicitly named, such as in the suggestive title of Georges Didi-Huberman’s book Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde (What we see looks at us; Paris 1992). The viewer experiences being looked at, which endows his access to the work with the character of a response and also confers a different meaning to the concept of reception. Now, there exist totally different ways of dealing with the gaze in portraits. Let us focus on the particularly revealing historical turn that arose with the independent, or autonomous, portrait. The autonomous portrait is understood to be a pictorial form that displays the person for her own sake, bestowing the gaze with an extraordinary emphasis and particular distinction (G. Boehm, Bildnis und Individuum, Munich 1985). It arose at the end of the fifteenth century, first in the Netherlands and Italy, and then came to domi­nate the genre of the portrait. Whoever decides to be photographed – to present herself as a self – is subjected to the rules introduced at that time, namely, to claiming a pictorial field for herself alone and to forswearing all or most of the accompanying attributes so as to show herself in what is particular to her and her alone. That is why official photographs for identity documents (passports, identity cards, etc.) are tied to precise guidelines for the gaze. Let us now turn to a few incunables of this mode of representation. It is through them that the grandiose history of the individual’s becoming image began, a history that has developed over centuries and whose possibilities have still not been exhausted. When we look at works by Jan van Eyck, Antonello da Messina, Giorgione, Lorenzo Lotto, Leo­ nardo da Vinci, Albrecht Dürer, and Raphael – who all opened this terrain of representation – we see that the conspicuous intensification of the gaze occurs, as already suggested, when the painter excludes everything that does not directly belong to the person. The represented person largely withdraws from all external relations so as to make visible what has since been called the person, the subject, the individual, a singularity, a monad, or simply “ somebody.” This withdrawal has two consequences: first, the focus on the person as such and, second, a new kind of presence in the world, a presence produced by the dominating gaze. Now, by no means are all new portraits so resolute in their intention. On the contrary, we also find ones in which the relation to external references is not at all cut off and other artistic intentions are dom-

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inant. Then the represented person no longer refers to the person himself; instead, he is governed by his social role, appears as the representative of a milieu, political power, profession, or social class or also of a gender. Whoever is the representative of something is not himself. But prominent commissions of images often pursue this intention, and this certainly also has consequences for the gaze. It is not a coincidence that one speaks, for example, of the “ official air” of a dignitary, such as with regard to Giovanni Bellini’s portrait of the Doge Leonardo Loredan (London). Here the focus on the sternness of the bust is tied to the political role visualized by the headgear. Gazes can be loaded with meaning in many ways. For example, they can refer to added attributes or to an expressive ambience. Often enough, a sovereign habitus is already sufficient, when reinforced by a few symbols or emblems, to visualize the represented person in his social role and to divert from a focus on the monologue of self-relation. Art history has distinguished between the genres of history painting and portraiture based on the question of the external reference of what is represented. The portrait focuses on an individual who is not involved in actions. Only when “ nothing” is happening does the gaze have a chance to turn to the person’s character, and one can then speak of an autonomous portrait. But the dominant consensus regarding this point is rash. For the withdrawal from external relations and references does not extinguish the presence of the essential vitality produced above all by the gaze. This vitality is associated with the oft-overlooked impression that a figure could act. She has the tools to become active, without of course being active in the pictorial field. In other words, in portraits, the preconditions are present for transitioning to action and, at the same time, for abstaining from it. If that were not the case, then the individual would appear isolated, as an abstract and possibly powerless entity and not as the strong potential she shows herself to be. In other words, autonomous portraits are in the verbal mode of the subjunctive. Their protagonists possess an ability that maintains itself in great concentration. Analyzing the gaze offers the key to understanding this noteworthy combination of withdrawal and affection, interiority and exteriority. This is because the eye is doubly coded, which was already confirmed by the old metaphor of the eye as a window into the soul, since windows

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have the quality of offering a view out and a view in. This simultaneous combination can only be realized by the gaze. It articulates this transition silently and without uttering a single word. Could it not be that we are here on the trail of what one calls the self, which above all shows itself beyond language? The continuing relevance of the portrait evidently feeds on this extraordinary experience. Translated by Anthony Mahler 2020

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Horst Bredekamp

The most complex and most adequate theory of portraits was formulated by Nicolas Cusanus in the 15th century, contemporarily to the portraits of Jan van Eyck. In De Visione Dei, Cusanus presented a theory of chiastic relationships between the person portrayed and his or her portrait by arguing that not only the subject of the painting is able to look at the artwork, but that this itself is looking at the beholder. In Idiota de Mente, he developed his theory further into a most astonishing concept of similarity. Portraits, he argues, that perfectly resemble the person portrayed are empty and bloodless, whereas those which establish a certain distance between these two poles not only represent the portrayed but also the vector of tension and power that is acting between them. These are the genuine portraits: not similar, but true. Unconsciously or through deeper knowledge, Luca Del Baldo confirmed the second element of Cusanus’ theory of portraiture. He did not confront sitters in order to perform his insightful paintings, but used photographs of them. Turning the photographs into paintings, he instantiates a distance between the indexical character of the photographic representation and the constructive touch of the brush. It is astounding that through his capacity of empathy, which comes not only from his knowledge of photography but also from the lives and works of those he depicted, he was able to present the portrayed in a much more indexical way than photography itself could ever have achieved. In his

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series, he conducts the miracle of art: to go beyond the realm of representation and thus trace the very character of what is shown. Of course, also photographs hold this capacity. But his paintings after photographs install the vector of difference that for Cusanus is the condition of true representation. I do know a number of the portrayed researchers personally, and I was impressed by the similarity of my internal pictures of these persons and their outer appearance as being evoked through Del Baldo’s paintings. His series of portraits stands in the tradition of Illustrium Imagines as founded by Andrea Fulvio in 1517, or by Paolo Giovio with his similar approach in 1549. These illustrated books were meant to install not only emperors but also humanists in the Hall of Fame. In this tradition, Luca Del Baldo establishes a special circle of Uomini Illustri: researchers who deal with the problem of images in our times. Thus, he reflects upon the necessity to reflect the powers and possibilities of pictures in a world in which visualization has become a conditio sine qua non in all fields of life: economy, war, culture, entertainment and research. His circle of the Uomini Illustri of pictorial research is a reflection of the capacity of the object as such. I feel very honored to be included in this endeavor, together with friends and colleagues whom in parts I have known for a very long time. 2015

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Richard Brettell

After first meeting Luca Del Baldo through email and learning about his project, I was deeply skeptical, then amused, and finally enthusiastic. We went back and forth, writing about painters we admired and looking at his series of portrait paintings of men and women considerably more accomplished than I am. Yet, the one easy part, for me, was the choice of a photograph to send him – a very recent one taken on the sunny terrace of a restaurant in Dallas by my friend and colleague, the architectural critic and historian Mark Lamster, with whom I was having a negroni, shortly after a return from Naples. Mark had liked my jaunty new glasses and my silly grin, had taken out his cell phone, and VOILA! I loved it and sent it immediately to Luca, who also responded well to it. Then his transformations began. A busy terrace scene became a quivering background of browns like a 19th century ébauche. The format was tightened to focus on my face, but the lopsided grin and the eyes – squinting against the Texas sun – were retained. And my teeth – the color of those of a venerable bull walrus – were celebrated, un-­whitened by current dental wizardry or artist’s license. He sent it at various stages – the first with too much hair on top – he must be balding too, I thought – which I insisted that he remove or reduce. The tonal transitions, at first quite crude, tightened considerably, but retained the sense of rapid observation and transcription

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which is so important for my “ take” on the aesthetic of Impressionist painters I have studied for half a century. What to think of it? Art historians tend to think “ visually” – by association with other works of art in our memory banks – what my alter-ego Paul Gauguin called “ memoire des yeux.” And this method fits well with the idea of “ occularity” promulgated by Luca – an idea with which I continue to grapple. First there were the numerous version of “ Les Grimaces” in French art of the early 19th century, particular Louis Leopold Boilly and, to a lesser extent, Honoré Daumier. And then what popped into my mind were the wonderful heads of Franz Xaver Messerschmidt I had so admired as an undergraduate, especially his self-portrait laughing of about 1777. The animation of the faces in the “ Grimaces” and in most Messerschmidt sculptures has always intrigued me – faces alive with muscular “ gesture” with their wrinkles, crease lines, and deep crevices, most of which perform a parallel rhythmic dance across the face. I remembered as well learning once that that the word “ Grimace” has its origins in the Greek word for “ Mask,” and I immediately realized that, in choosing the photograph, I had chosen an image of the mask of comedy, with eyes almost shut and a big smile, that one sees so often on playbills and relief sculptures in Euro-American theaters. This made me realize that, in many ways, I aspire to be the “ comic muse of art history,” an entertainer, more adept on the lecture stage or in the classroom than on the page and, in the latter case, happier writing for what Virginia Wolf called the “ common reader” than for my colleagues in art history departments. I prefer to present arguments and ideas with a sleight of hand or even a joke, using information and historical facts as grace notes or ornaments in Baroque music – to enliven and personalize the structure of the work of art. So, I wear my comic mask for Luca and, thus, for his selected viewers. The next levels of association for me were the sequence of “ portraits” of ordinary people by Frans Hals that represent them with their eyes squinting and the mouths broadly open in a smile, a particular favorite being The Laughing Fisherboy of 1628 in a private aristocratic collection in Westphalia that I know only from photographs. The pose is completely different, but the sense of the carefree, joyous life is one which I so admire – it is so rare that “ great” works of art make us laugh or smile,

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and Hals was clearly unable to do something so apparently silly when painting commissioned portraits of his Haarlem burgers, no matter how apparently slapdash his brushwork. Also, of course, the famous Malle Babbe in the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, which I remember vividly seeing for the first time, after I had seen the copy in storage at the MET and the sly copy by Courbet in Munich. Unlike the Laughing Fisherboy, Malle Babbe has been identified as a mentally ill or an alcoholic woman from Haarlem in much modern scholarship, and this association took me on another train of associations to a time years ago when I was writing about what may have been Degas’ only commissioned portrait – of Mme. Deitz Monin at the Art Institute of Chicago. This gouache and metallic paint on silk exhibited originally as “ Portrait after a Costume Ball” was rejected because the sitter, whose mouth was wide open revealing her teeth, thought that she looked drunk. This again, made me riff on the Comic Muse – the Dionysian figure of earthy drunkenness, whose love of eating and drinking defines his character. I too adore to eat and drink with pleasure and abandon, and to talk while in semi-intoxicated or heightened states about art. No wonder I study Gauguin, who had cases of Bordeaux shipped to the Marquesan Islands at the end of his short life. This train of works took me next to the wonderful series of paintings of laughing boys done early in the last century by one of the US’s most gestural artists, Robert Henri, whose book The Art Spirit, I have admired since I was a boy in Colorado. Each of these paintings – whether by Hals or Henri – are what we were trained to call “ painterly,” but which I prefer to call gestural because, although the material of oil paint IS important, it is trumped by the idea of the painting as a performance of gestures, and this idea is very much alive in Del Baldo’s portrait of me. It is, of course, no accident that, during the course of our friendship, we talked often of what we were each cooking or eating about when we might eat or drink together in either Como or Dallas. Then the eyes and the glasses. How can one do a portrait about “ occularity” of a subject who lives by his eyes in combination with his mind and memory in which you can’t even SEE the eyes. What color are they? Are they blinded by the light? Is the grimace a form of ocular protection? The glasses and their blue-green color are utterly “ now,” but look back to the long tradition of the representation of the human figure

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with glasses. My favorite example is one that is local to me, Esteban Murillo’s wonderful Four Figures on a step in the Kimbell Art Museum, whose wise older lady wears prominent black-rimmed glasses to see the painting’s presumed male viewed clearly and to size up his interests – perhaps, as some art historians have suggested, of a sexual nature. How different she is than the artist who stares at himself in the mirror with the aid of glasses in one of the two versions of Chardin’s pastel self-portraits in the Louvre (1775) and the Institute of Chicago (1776). For Chardin, there is no smile, no facial cue to mood or state of mind. Only a clear-eyed and steady gaze into the mirror that, becomes the artist appears with the aid of a visor which protects his eyes from strong light, he can gaze with open pupils at himself. There is no such protective visor in Del Baldo’s portrait of an art historian who was, when the photograph behind it was taken, just five years younger than the famous French artist at the end of the ancient regime. Indeed, the absence of the visor means that the sun glints brightly on the plastic “ glass” of the lenses, turning them into both windows to the slit-eyes and mirrors of the light-struck world at which they gaze. Mirrors and windows – the two greatest metaphors for pictures themselves – are brought together in Del Baldo’s painted glasses. One could write a book about the representation of glasses, monocles, and other “ viewing devices” in western art history – perhaps it has already been written, but here the work itself raises all the necessary questions associated with this trope without the need of precedence. Perhaps the chief originality of the glasses lies in their brilliant color – hard actually to name with precision – and its chromatic interaction with the ruddy hues of a healthy face and the “ neutral” beiges, whites, and blue-gray of the rest of the portrait. If there is “ occularity” in the picture, it is less in the eyes than in the glasses – oddly appropriate because my eyes are actually blue. When I contemplated this project, my mind eventually came back to my own personal relationship with one of the greatest artists I have ever known – with the delightfully unlikely name of Ivan Le Lorraine Albright. Ivan and I met on the tarmac of Heathrow Airport nearly forty years ago when a couple known to me only as “ Mr. and Mrs. Albright” from Vermont joined a small group of prominent donors to the Art Institute of Chicago on a specially arranged tour of country house collections in

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England led by me, then the newly appointed Curator of European Painting. Ivan was a tiny man who wore thick glasses and spoke with such speed and intensity that he often inter-folded sentences one into the other, requiring the listener to separate them into intelligible speech. His intellectual energy was tumultuous, and his ability to look at pictures so practiced at the age of 83 that only a youthful curator (I was 30) would have the audacity to spar with him in front of pictures. We started at Burghley House and were moving confidently as practiced interlocutors by the time we were with David Bomford in the Old Master Galleries of the National Gallery – a young art historian and an elderly artist, looking intently together and talking with a conservator. Ivan Albright had essentially stopped painting by that time, but the trip so invigorated him that I kept pressing him to take up the brush again, which he finally agreed to do if I went to his art supply man in Chicago and had them make head-sized panels for him to make his final collective masterpiece – a series of self-portrait first shown at the Hood Museum art Dartmouth and eventually given to The Art Institute of Chicago. He worked on the series with total determination until his death in 1983, just two years after we met, and his self-portraits benefitted not only from his completely original technical experimentation with the various mediums on prepared panels, but also with his almost unparalleled visual memory of western art history. The one in which he wore the glasses he needed to use for distant seeing is one of my favorites, and it differs from Luca Del Baldo’s portrait of me in that we see completely through the lenses to his own eyes – tired, but practiced as they were. As I look at it today I am reminded just how vital the eyes and visual memories of artists are to the adventure of looking at works of art practiced by art historians – whose technique is usual limited to words, sentences, and paragraphs. As he looked at himself in his studio in Woodstock Vermont, he was utterly alone, but in making the paintings, there were always two of him – the one in the mirror and the one in the painting. For me, not able to make my own self-portrait, two intermediaries were required – my friend Mark Lamster and my new friend Luca Del Baldo. Because of them, I can look at a painting and see myself anew. 2019

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Jonathan Brown

Luca’s portrait project is a synthesis of two of the mainstreams of European portraiture – the individual portrait and the group portrait. Un­ like portraits of a single sitter, group portraits were designed to express shared ideas rather than individual accomplishments or status. Individual portraits are self-explanatory. However, group portraits come in two formats. One of these, perhaps the most familiar, is comprised of several figures who observe and participate in a single event. The other is comprised of series of individual portraits which record the appearance of successive holders of an office. These might include viceroys, prelates, civic officials, members of the nobility, scholars or men of learning. One example of the many would be the series of archbishops of Toledo, which is installed in the Chapter Room of the Cathedral of Toledo. This series, which begins with the Portrait of San Eugenio de Toledo, (4th century) is continued up to the present day. The result is ennui. All the compositions show the prelates in a half-length pose, wearing ecclesiastical vestments. Little space is left for the inventive capacities of the painter. These days, portraits in series are commonplace and commemorate every sort of office holder. Examples include politicians, magistrates, university presidents and CEO’s. The number is beyond counting. All share a belief in the power of the image to evoke memory and glorify achievement.

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The other option – the group portrait – is far more challenging and accordingly has produced a small but heady number of what can only be called masterpieces. Velazquez’ Las Meninas and Rembrandt’s Night Watch immediately come to mind. Other examples are Courbet’s Study and Manet’s Dejeuner sur l’herbe. Given the challenges they pose to a painter, group portraits have nearly died out except in the medium of photography. Luca’s project synthesizes these two options in an imaginative way. The individual portraits are records of notable men and women who dwell in the realm of thearts and letters. Gathered together between the covers of a book, they assume the identity of group portrait. The texts composed by the sitters that accompany the portraits conjoin the verbal and visual image in an innovative way. Footnote: It is worth noting that the Italian humanist Paolo Giovio (1483 – 1552) built a villa on Lake Como in which he housed his collection of portraits of famous people. Unfortunately this villa was destroyed in the 17th century and the collection, lost. A set of copies of his paintings from the collection, now known as the Giovio Series is in the Uffizi Gallery. Five centuries later Luca Del Baldo, a resident of Como, has revived this splendid portrait project in the form of a book. 2019

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Norman Bryson For Luca

When Luca Del Baldo explained to me the scope of his “ visionary academy of ocular mentality,” my first thought was to go search through old files for a suitably academic photograph – of which I came across many: taken at a conference in Madrid, or in the courtyard of the Sackler Museum, or on the steps of some library or other. Yet when I saw more of Luca’s work in portraiture, I realized that they were all too formulaic, simply too thin for the artist to work on or depart from. They were photographs of the kind that accumulate by themselves over a career, products of happenstance, of occasions when my presence was no more than incidental. I took no personal interest in any of them. In fact, among a lifetime of photographs taken of me, there is only one in which I can truly see myself. An acanthus pattern tattoo of my upper left arm had just been completed, and this may have been the prompt for the photograph. It was taken in 2010 by my life partner David McDowell, under the spotlight in the dark hallway outside the playroom of our house in California. What astonished me about the photograph is that I appeared, for once, as  a “ sensuous and intelligent being” (Schiller) – and not just a bookworm. Somehow the photographic apparatus had been absorbed or internalized and the camera could see through the eyes of Dave, through the eyes of love. This singular image had a counterpart – a picture I once took secretly of Dave, sunbathing on a recliner and falling asleep,

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his beard glistening in the July sunshine, looking gorgeous. You know how it is when you look at the one you love as they sleep: it can take your breath away. Many years have passed since then. We have both changed and aged. Yet when I think of Dave, it is still that image that persists and rings true, in spite of time.

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When I accepted Luca’s generous invitation I had not yet seen any of his paintings, but now I began to seek them out. As a portraitist, what were his aims? How did he manage pigment and brushes? What feelings did his work tend to summon in his viewers? I began with his portrait of Madonna, made relatively late in her career, at the time of her 12th studio album (MDNA) in 2012. By this date Madonna had passed through a great many transformations – virgin bride, material girl, dominatrix, yogini, dancing queen. The publicity shot for MDNA, from which Luca must have worked, revealed a Madonna softer than before, less kinetic, her hair arranged in crimped blond waves like a 30s movie star, her face impassive and her complexion radiant, flawless, smooth as ivory. Luca’s reworking of the photographic image systematically dismantled the work of idealization that publicity shots and fashion photographs are designed to accomplish. Stripping away the superficial mask of beauty, his portrait revealed very different conditions of the face that lay beneath. Where in the photograph flesh and makeup fused, now they separated. Eyelashes that had formed a luxuriant and dreamy blur now stood out from her face, hair by hair, as if glued in place. Lipstick that in the photograph so completely blended with skin-tone as to seem almost natural, became a swathe of paint laid over a mouth that in its lines of muscular tension revealed unsuspected depths – of vulnerability, disappointment, resilience. From beneath the mask of beauty there emerged a face marked by time and experience, with the scars and the toughness of a survivor. If the photograph were the only evidence, one would have no idea of who Madonna was or what her career had achieved; no understanding of the way her performances took hold of the codes of femininity and utterly changed them, by sheer force of  personality forging a new kind of uber-empowered, hypersexualized female star that became the dominant model of femininity for the next generation of performers. Yet that was exactly the understanding that emerged from Luca’s portrait, which, looking past the pretext of the publicity shot, recognized the toughness, the iron will and feral energy that lay behind all Madonna’s performances. Luca’s project comes at a critical moment in the history of the portrait, when the combined forces of democracy and global communication have taken what originated as a genre for the privileged few, and caused it to explode worldwide into an internet glittering with a billion human

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countenances. To navigate the multitude, facial recognition software simplified the complexity of the face to a basic cluster of salient points, and human users learned to do much the same, passing over the array of faces at increasing speeds and with growing indifference. One can think of Luca’s transposition of the photo-portrait into the medium of oils as a work of sustained opposition to the degradation and trivialization of the contemporary portrait image, its drift into entropy. In place of “ instantaneous automatic reactions,” writes Barbara Stafford, Luca mobilizes “ the power of slow looking, the thoughtful judgment that comes from deliberation, from the gradual unveiling of the phenomenological fragments that constitute ‘you’.” Breaking free from the photographic instant, the work of the brush opens a space for critical reflection within which the painter, like any classical por­ traitist, is able to assess not simply the sitter’s visual appearance but their whole character. I am reminded of Goya’s portrait of the Spanish court, and the multiple aspects each one embodies, as if the artist were to say: ‘Ridiculous! A complete buffoon! With what arrogance he attempts to hide his own stupidity! Yet also see how damaged he is, and how lonely, how much he would welcome some human warmth, of which I can spare a little.’ Consider his remarkable portrait of art critic Robert Hughes, made a year before his death in 2012. Hughes was regarded by many in the world of journalism (in university circles, not so much) as the greatest art critic of our time. He had been the first to give an account of modern art in terms the general public could understand and enjoy, and he did so without condescension, relying on his own love for the art of the 20th century to convey his thought to the audience. He had an exceptional ability to compress complex intuition into nuggets that his readers could take away with them. Of the work of painter R.B. Kitaj he observed that it had “ the sense of not knowing the whole story that comes from being close up to traumatic events.” He was fond of working his ideas into thunderous, Churchill-like pronouncements. Of the post-Soviet artist duo, Komar and Melamid, he said that “ it is the nature of carnivores to get power and then, having disposed of their enemies, to deploy the emollient power of Great Art to make themselves look like herbivores.” Following the success of The Shock of the New (1981) he came to feel he was living at a time when the original

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energies of modernism had become exhausted: “ So much of art – not all of it, than God – but a lot of it has become just a cruddy game for the aggrandizement of the rich and ignorant.” In later years the contempt he felt toward the art world resembled the scorn that Alexander Pope meted out on literary London in the Dunciad. He never doubted he was right. 2019

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Peter Burke Reflections on Portraits

When I was a teenager, I was an enthusiastic amateur artist, in a realist mode, graduating from still life – I was quite good at reflections on bottles – to architectural drawings and water colours of interiors. I never dared attempt portraits – the problem is that everyone recognizes a likeness, or the failure to achieve one. On the other hand, I was impressed by certain portraits, such as the young man by Botticelli, in the National Gallery in London, the unflattering self-portraits by Rembrandt and Hogarth, and the cold beauty of Bronzino’s Eleanora de Toledo. I was impressed above all by the portraits by Hans Holbein of the lords and ladies of the court of Henry VIII. I used to believe that these portraits and especially the preparatory sketches, which seem more spontaneous, reveal the character of the sitters, such as Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell. Perhaps I still do. In English history, More has traditionally been a hero, while Cromwell, if not exactly a villain, has been portrayed by historians as cunning, ruthless and possibly brutal. The novelist Hilary Mantel has recently tried to reverse the two images in her recent historical novels, making More into a sadist who believes in burning heretics and may be a pedophile, while Cromwell is an ideal husband and father (in a twenty-­firstcentury style rather than a sixteenth-century one). I don’t find the reversal convincing, thanks not only to literary evidence but also to Holbein’s portraits. Remember the famous image of Richard Nixon, the

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Republican candidate in the presidential election of 1960, a photograph that was used by the Democrats on a poster with the caption, ‘would you buy a used car from this man?’ (Nixon lost). In similar fashion, if the caption were ‘would you trust this man with your life?’ I would choose Holbein’s More over his Cromwell every time. As a cultural historian, I am interested in portraits as evidence for the ideals dominant in a particular place and time and illustrated by the manner in which individuals are presented in paint; their postures, gestures, clothes (armour as a sign of upper-class masculinity, even for individuals who were never in battle, and high or low-cut dresses as a thermometer of the sexual mores of a given period). For a cultural analysis of a portrait to give the best results it should really be full-length and surrounded by objects, ‘properties’ or ‘props’ in the theatrical sense of the term but also props to identity in the sense of supports. It is fascinating to view the objects with which different kinds of sitter are associated – classical columns and velvet curtains in the age of the baroque, swords for men, fans for women, dogs (big hunting dogs for male aristocrats, puppies for their wives), deferential servants for important people, books for scholars and so on. So many devices of self-presentation, whether what they present are the sitters’ images of themselves or the artist’s image of them (not very flattering in the case of Goya’s Charles IV) or even the artist’s image of the sitter’s self-image. Even a head-and-shoulders portrait can be revealing. Sufficient clothing is visible to give viewers a sense of the sitter’s social class and character (Does he wear a tie? What kind of necklace or ear-rings is she wearing?). The artist may insist on a particular pose, like the photo­ grapher in Hamburg who produced the image of me that Luca used as his base. In this case, I am happy to say, the artist’s image of me and my self-image are not very far apart. Thank you, Luca! 2018

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Judith Butler

I sometimes reflect upon the fact that I can never see my face when I am giving a lecture. I only reflect on that condition after the lecture because during the lecture I have no face, even though, for others, I may be all face. It is not that I imagine myself faceless, but that I do not imagine anything at all. At times, I am aware that I am swaying or moving as a way to keep the words coming forth and moving out. At that point, I am more like a body in motion and the words are the verbal forms of movement. But the face is nowhere, except, of course, that it belongs to the head, and the head must try to move between page and audience, even when the audience cannot be seen (on a video or in an auditorium where the light is blinding). So it is with some surprise that I learn that I have a face when I speak, since it seems to me that the speaking comes from the lungs and from the cavity that holds the lungs, from the torso that holds the lungs, and from the kinaesthetic body that either sits or stands and so lets the whole sequence of speech move forward and outward. The face is necessary, but perhaps only as part of an opaque cranial region, one whose main purpose is to achieve and keep posture so that this exhalation of words can take place. Of course, I know I am seen from elsewhere, but I do not see that seeing. And on those few occasions when I look at myself as others might, I recoil from the scene. If I take that point of view, I lose my speech, so I can only speak by forgetting the face that makes it possible. After all, the face

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belongs to you, not me, so to keep my words or, rather, to give them, I must use my face or, rather, let my face use my words or let you use my face in order to catch my words. And this happens without ever apprehending it from the outside. I am trying to get outside with my words, but they are already before me and outside me, so whatever is spoken through the mouth that edges onto the face, whose edge helps to make the face, is something I cannot grasp with sight. I could not speak watching myself. But perhaps I could and would speak with my eyes closed. 2011

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David Carrier

In Europe, the old master tradition was dominated by history paintings. Grand scenes from Greco-Roman history or Scripture, these were the most highly approved subjects of art. Nicolas Poussin, who was a history painter reluctantly did a self-portrait in 1650 under pressure by a patron. Normally he was too ambitious and too busy to bother with painting portraits. Like the pure landscape and the still life, the portrait was in the seventeenth-century an odd marginal artistic genre. In the eighteenth century, in his lectures for the Royal Academy Sir Joshua Reynolds praised the history paintings of Michelangelo and Raphael, while admitting that in his own culture the most important art forms were the landscape and the portrait. In Protestant England, the gentry purchased old master religious art, but there was little market for large-scale contemporary sacred art or for history paintings. Landscapes and portraits were the dominant genres for English artists. Modernism, with its emphasis upon the painting of scenes of contemporary life effectively killed history painting. Édouard Manet’s The Execution of Maximilian (1867-69) treats that contemporary event with all of the seriousness an old master would give to a historical scene. Like the other Impressionists, he also painted some important portraits. The important subjects for these artists of contemporary life were café scenes, cityscapes, landscapes, and the individuals shown in portraits. In the twentieth century, portraiture became a relatively minor genre.

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Pablo Picasso’s great Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (1910), a marvelous exercise in cubism, shows his patron and dealer in a style in which few sitters, even the most adventuresome, would find attractive. Henri Matisse, similarly, though he painted some portraits, did not develop a mode of visual thinking well suited to doing images of recognizable individuals. And then such varied styles of painting as Futurism, Sur­ realism, and, most especially Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism did not support portraiture. Nowadays when corporate CEOs or political officials retire, they have their portraits painted. But the artists who made such pictures were not generally of much importance within the art world. The most important late modernist to do portraits was Andy Warhol. When in the 1970s he did portraits of fellow artists, movie stars and anyone who was rich enough, he was highly criticized for being so very commercial. Logically speaking, that complaint makes no sense. All artists, from the most serious abstractionists to the frankly commercial decorators depend upon art market sales. But while many critics were willing to admire Warhol’s portraits when he made self-portraits, or images of celebrities like Jackie Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe, works that could be interpreted as modern history paintings, they did not take seriously his commissioned portraits, which in fact have much in common with Reynolds’s presentations of his patrons. Luca Del Baldo came of age, then, at a time when portraiture was a rela­ tively marginal genre. He does, of course, make images of varied subjects, paintings about death for example, but here I focus exclusively on what I know best, his portraits. More exactly, since I am fortunate enough to possess a portrait of myself by him I focus on that one painting. The Swiss-­German art historian Heinrich Wölfflin pioneered the traditional art history lecture procedure, employing parallel dual slide comparisons. You can learn a lot about the baroque by comparing classical art, and much about German painting by juxtaposing Italian pictures. Emulating that procedure, allow me to imagine comparing another portrait of me, this one by the American artist and art historian Jonathan Weinberg. We don’t have a reproduction here, so I will conjure it up with a little bit of word-painting. How astonishingly different are these two images. Del Baldo works from photographs; he painted my portrait before we met. Weinberg

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works from life. I met him a few years ago at the Clark Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts when we both were doing research there. He is a magnetic personality and so, after we talked frequently at length I wanted that he paint my portrait. When working he allows you to talk, but you need to sit still. After he did an initial version of the painting, he took a photograph, which he used to revise the painting. His painting, which is much larger than Del Baldo’s, poses me before some works of art. Recently I’d lectured in India, and so the colorful little pictures I’d brought back made a nice contrast to my dark sweater. Weinberg’s and Del Baldo’s paintings express very diverse sensibilities. Weinberg, an important pioneering scholar devoted to ‘queer studies’, has written extensively about gay male art. You need only compare the covers of his books and paintings with the art illustrated on Del Baldo’s website to see that they are very different sorts of persons and artists. Both of these portraits hang in my living room, and so at dinner I can turn my eyes from one to the other. You can learn a lot about art by contrasting two such works. One reason that such self-portraits are fascinating is that personal stories like mine often come with them. There is, also, a third self-portrait that I think about when I look at Del Baldo’s painting. It comes with another personal story. For some years at bedtime I read the Tintin comics to my daughter Liz Carrier, who was born in 1984. Then when she became older and we abandoned that custom, I kept those comics and on my own thought a lot about them. Eventually, indeed, I wrote my own book about comic strips. That book needed a cover-picture, and so my mother Louise Farcher Carrier, unearthed a photograph showing me, aged ten, reading a comic. And the inventive designer used a thought balloon to enclose the title of my book, as if to show that long ago at age ten I was already thinking of publishing a book about comics. (That of course is a fiction.) I am immensely thankful to Del Baldo, and to the people associated with these other portraits of me, whose images inspire happy reflection. You can learn a great deal about art and maybe also a little about yourself by looking at portraits. 2011

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Noam Chomsky

The portrait is highly evocative, and if it were of someone else, I think I could comment on it. But though it may seem strange given the life I lead, I have always preferred to be very private, and apart from necessity, would gladly remain so. That carries over to listening to my own voice, answering personal questions, writing anything autobiographical that goes beyond what is part of the public sphere – and contemplating a portrait of myself and trying to articulate the thoughts it arouses. For better or worse. 2013

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T. J. Clark For Luca Del Baldo

What is it they say? – ‘Every picture tells a story.’ Or maybe it cannot itself tell the story, and waits patiently to hear one told about it, true or false – waits for the proud old proprietor to turn aside in the corridor and say: ‘They say the lady in the painting belonged to a family with lands above Trento, and she came down to Bergamo in search of a husband, and when she was twenty-two or twenty-three, alas …’ My story does not have an unhappy ending. The photograph I sent Luca Del Baldo was taken two or three years ago, in a place I love: a great sweep of hills and forest by the Pacific, with whales going by, and paths where you can walk for an hour and see no one. For twenty years it was where I walked with my wife at weekends. It is very far away now, and I miss it, and we go back from time to time. The photo shows me sitting in the sunshine. I remember I was planted on a great fallen branch of a tree – the shadows of still living branches are visible on the grass. The tree stands above a stream running down to the beach – the Pacific is a few hundred yards away. I think the tree is a cottonwood. It is a massive, isolated, feathery thing; a landmark; you come over the hills from inland and see it below you against the ocean. I understand why Luca chose to edit the photograph I sent him, cutting away the right-hand third and concentrating on the creases on my face. The whole photo is (as they say) ‘too anecdotal’. As I was sitting on the whitened branch, a crow flew down from the cottonwood and perched on the branch close

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beside me. We held our breath. The bird sat still. I heard my wife reaching for her i-phone – I think the slight atmosphere of worry about my face must be partly me hoping the moment would last long enough to be recorded. It did. The crow was an entirely benign presence – both of us who saw it that morning had no doubt of that. It was welcoming me back to a land I cared for. If its blackness had a tinge of mortality to it – and I suppose that even in the charmed moment there must have been a faint sense of that in the background – it was as tactful, as gentle, as reasonable a harbinger as anyone could wish for. We were in America, but not the America of Poe. I know my face has its fill of wrinkles, and maybe my mouth looks a bit sour and skeptical. But these are super­ ficial, or anyway banal. It is Baudelaire who asks somewhere (I’m quoting from memory, and probably making him too sunny): ‘Qui n’a pas connu l’un de ces beaux jours de l’esprit …?’ – a day when air and color flood in as never before, and time stops, and all the world is a Delacroix. Let my face – absurdly, counter-factually, I concede – be the face of such a moment. There is one more thread to the story. I said that often while walking the hills my wife and I were more or less alone, but earlier that morning we’d rounded a bend and come face to face with someone we knew well – someone we’d lost touch with, and never really expected to see again. She had been one of our students. One of the best: she ended up writing a wonderful study of Mayakovsky and Rodchenko. I say she was one of the best; but she had not been one of the happiest. I believe – the matter was never talked about explicitly – that something dreadful, something violent, had been done to her in the past. She was courageous and humane: I know she spent years as a valued counselor in a Rape Crisis Center. So you can imagine what it meant to us to see her accompanied on the path by a beautiful small boy, whom she introduced as her son. His name, she said, was Zephyr. They were returning from a night in a campsite by the ocean. Please then, when you look at my portrait, see me still basking in life’s occasional good luck. 2018

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Karl Clausberg Meeting sideways in the Mirror

Every so often I watch my wife doing her make-up in front of our large wardrobe-mirror, and, looking at her reflection, I feel disturbingly alarmed: the mirrored person is a stranger. My own reflection in contrast seems to radiate invariably the sturdy presence of a long-known personality; not so the familiar looking woman at my side. I even remember furtively shifting my gaze to scrutinize her facial traits in the flesh for symptoms of this haunting metamorphosis. Or have I been looking for reassurance? Anyway, the paired comparisons in front of the mirror had been a source of recurring minor irritations and reconsiderations covering all the small angles of sustained matrimonial union. Luca Del Baldo’s project brought these fleeting impressions and musings into sharper focus. Why does my visual identity, established by photographic techniques, appear so much less prone to mirroring-transformation? Is my face less uneven – hence less beautiful or characteristic – than my wife’s? Or is it just my private self-justifying observance that does not tolerate a greater schism between reality and reflection while the dearest human at my side seems to suffer, in my incoherent perceptions, from a marked split of essence and mirrored appearance – the latter being of course the permanent simile of her self-awareness? Male obsessions with the dangers of mirror-inversion have a noble ancestry. Immanuel Kant addressed the riddles 1783 in his Prolegomena

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to Any Future Metaphysics: “ What indeed can be more similar to, and in all l parts more equal to, my hand or my ear than its Image in the mirror? And yet I cannot put such a hand as is seen in the mirror in the place of its original; for if the one was a right hand, then the other in the mirror is a left, and the image of the right ear is a left one, which can never take the place of the former. Now there are no inner differences here that any understanding could merely think; and yet the differences are inner as far as the senses teach, for the left hand cannot, after all, be enclosed within the same boundaries as the right (they cannot be made congruent), despite all reciprocal equality and similarity; one hand’s glove cannot be used on the other.”1 – Kant could not know that his very same glove turned inside out would become a telltale exhibit of trans-Euclidean geometries. In 1827 the mathematician August Ferdinand Möbius suggested rotation in a fourth dimension to solve such incongruities.2 Möbius was the co-inventor of the famous ‘loops’ named after him that eventually were shown to be subsets of an even more enigmatic entity, i.e. the notorious Klein bottle. In 1882 the mathematician Felix Klein described a strange piece of ‘plumbing’: If the ends of a rubber-pipe could be joined in such a way that they had to intersect in 3D, an object with only one boundless surface would be formed. The first illustration indeed looked like a crazy piece of sanitary installation.3 Eventually, triggered by a false, but meaningful translation of ‘Fläche’ into bottle, the ugly gadget evolved into a handsome apparition suitable for transdisciplinary application. In the 1960s French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan adopted the Klein-bottle to explain his eccentric views of psychic imbalances.4 From then on this spawn of pure topological reasoning has grown into a pandemic seed of higher-dimensional phantasies. Alongside of the more profound ‘readings’ a basic fact attracted attention: Images shifted around on a Möbius-strip or Klein-bottle would end up in a mirrored version. What relevance have such vaguely esoteric excursions for the appreciation of Luca Del Baldo’s enterprise in general or at least in regard of my ritratto? – In my case a delayed deliberation of the slightly hilarious circumstances ensued. I had failed to consider in time a possible inversion of my ‘passport’-photography in the light of arguments outlined above. On the other hand, the case of my wife’s estrangement by mir-

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roring had to be left aside. Instead I had to fit myself into the selected series of portraits whose originators may have administered similar or quite different thoughts. A few of the painterly ‘counterfeit identities’ were attached to Luca’s communications; commentaries as well. But there was no obvious in-group debate at hand. What could save me from feeling like a partially blind passenger on a merry-go-round? To dare a shortcut conclusion: Facing a mirror and looking sideways at other persons became a painterly topic with the production of larger sheets of flat glass. The asymmetries of visual communication progressed from old-fashioned perspectival constructs to photography, cinema &c. But the rules of representation are no longer restricted to plain Euclidian geometry. What then might be the hidden agenda of a personality-painter like Luca? Which signals are amplified by his artistic brain-activity? Should we take the obvious brushwork of his photo-­ replicas for a simile of not yet specified settings hovering above the tiny tremors of quantum-fluctuations that pervade all possible communication? Modern science and cosmology suggest that we are living in a huge hologram with our senses completely attuned to such contorted conditions.5 – Although I am not even a distant follower of Lacan, our prearranged convention of experts in effigie reminds me of a shifting assembly of images on/in a Klein-bottle. 2019 1  Immanuel Kant: Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik die als Wissenschaft wird auftreten können, Riga 1783. § 13. – Translation quoted after James Wesley Ellington: Kant. Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (Second Edition) 2001. 2  August Ferdinand Möbius: Der barycentrische Calcul, ein neues Hülfsmittel zur analytischen Behandlung der Geometrie: dargestellt und insbesondere auf die Bildung neuer Classen von Aufgaben und die Entwickelung mehrerer Eigenschaften der Kegelschnitte angewendet, Leipzig 1827, S. 184–185, Anmerkung. 3 Felix Klein: Über Riemann’s Theorie der Algebraischen Functionen und ihrer Integrale. Leipzig, 1882, S. 80. Dort erwähnte Klein “ gewisse unberandete Doppelflächen. Man kann sich von denselben ein Bild machen, indem man etwa ein Stück eines Kautschukschlauches umstülpt und nun so sich selbst durchdringen lässt, dass bei Zusammenbiegung der Enden die Aussenseite mit der Innenseite zusammenkommt.” – First illustration in Felix Klein, W. Rosemann: Vorlesungen über nicht-euklidische Geometrie, Berlin 1928. Für die präzisen Literaturnachweise danke ich Renate Tobies: Felix Klein: Visionen für Mathematik, Anwendungen und Unterricht, Heidelberg 2019, spez. S. 229f. 4  Lacan discussed the Klein bottle especially in Seminar 12, Sessions of Dec. 9th and 16th 1964 and Jan. 6. 1965. 5  Leonard Susskind: The Black Hole War, 2008.

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James Clifford Portrait Time

Before Luca Del Baldo’s invitation, I hadn’t thought much about the difference between a painting and a photograph. Of course, the relationship has been exhaustively discussed in art history and criticism, ever since the first (often repeated) claim that photography would be “ the death of painting.” Painting didn’t die and has even, in a sense, prevailed. Photography’s ontological claim to deliver what is, or as Barthes wrote, what was (ça a été), in front of the lens is now subverted by digital manipulation. David Hockney even claims that photography is now a kind of painting, since any shape or color can be created. Luca’s portrait-from-a-photograph combines the two different kinds of representation. And it’s a complicated performance. Where, and when, exactly is the referent? Is it still what was really there in front of the camera’s lens? Is this the portrait of an individual? A particular mo­ ment? A process of transformation? Such questions, properly asked of any representation that makes claims to realism, are particularly tricky when “ the referent” is doing the asking. I discovered this when accepting Luca’s invitation and then reacting (so far, only electronically) to successive versions of the work. The photo I chose was taken while I was speaking, last Fall, at the Festival Filosofia, in Modena. I wondered whether a photo that was clearly not posed would be appropriate. In my own amateur photography, I collect images in a file called “ portraits” where the rule of inclusion is simply

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that an image should be in relative close-up, with its subject aware of the camera. I knew that photographs were being taken during my lecture so what I sent to Luca qualified. In addition, its uniform background (the Festival’s signature red color) created a frame that suggested a portrait. In any event, I liked the image because the person portrayed was not, like most of the others in Luca’s collection, looking toward the lens. The face seemed active and expressive: quizzical, even a bit hopeful. When the first rendering appeared on my screen, I was drawn to its roughly-painted vitality. Two versions later, I still prefer it to the finished work, though I like that too. What struck me right away was the picture’s mix of closeness and distance, familiarity and alienation. (I see from others’ comments on Luca’s portraits that I’m not alone in this reaction.) The painting closely resembled the original image, but with a realism quite different from a photographic record. It seemed to be the portrait of another person. That person, whom I’ve found myself describing as “ he,” is made of paint. I was accustomed to confronting myself in photographs. Like an early morning glimpse in the bathroom mirror, they were unwelcome correctives for the imaginary self-image I normally live with. Unexpectedly, this portrait freed me from reactions based on vanity or ego. Since it wasn’t me, I could look closely. The computer’s zoom revealed how the paint had been brushed on and layered, and how pigments had been scattered in ways that subverted expectations of an objective body or a discrete shape. The colors, while flattening a spatial field, added temporal depth: evidence of making, unmaking, remaking. “ Painting” – both noun and gerund. I discovered not a person or even a moment, captured once and for all, but instead a process, marks of transformation. The background, which Luca tells me is a mix of Burnt Sienna, Terra di Siena brucuata, and vermillion, can be seen throughout the man’s head. His hair is streaked with red filaments. His eyelids, cheeks, nostrils, lips, and especially his neck (where the color’s thickness almost suggests blood) are all spattered with this strong color. More subtly, the blue of the shirt collar bleeds upwards into the cheeks, eyes, ear and hair, softening to a blue-grey that actively complements the background.

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Patches of this bluish grey (or is it greyish blue) can be found all over the face, especially on its less-illuminated side. Here the skin (relatively smooth in the photo) appears to be gouged, or plastered. This is a surface that’s changing: built-up, adhesive, crumbling. It’s susceptible to the forces of gravity and oxidation, universal adversaries (as well as vital necessities) for any living creature. A body that both yields and resists. Thinking about the portrait’s realism, I’m reminded of Francis Bacon’s absorbing interviews with David Sylvester in which he argues that violent deformation, rather than accurate illustration, is the way to render the real presence of someone or something. (Luca’s paintings of corpses come to mind.) A painted portrait is manifestly a picture of someone altered by time, ageing and therefore dying. It’s also evidence of animation: living and dying together. I’m grateful to Luca for my translation into paint, for what it’s showing me about temporality and the forms of realism. But having now joined his Academy, I feel a certain melancholy. Where and when are we, this gathering of intellectuals? Our portraits look out from inside Europe and North America (once the “ First World,” or “ the West”). And from the late 20th Century (the time our ideas were formed). The photo portrait I chose had seemed quizzical to me, even a bit hopeful. A friend called its expression “ expectant.” The person in Luca’s painting looks worried, still expectant but no longer hopeful. Anxious inwardness and anxiety have emerged. The lines of the brow and in one cheek are deeper; a mouth that once hinted at a downturned smile is now more compressed, weighted with pigment; one eye seems, at times, to be looking in a slightly different direction from the other, unfocused. If I can’t identify with this face that looks so much like mine, I do find it interesting, Interrogative. I recognize myself in the painting’s change of mood, a feeling that no doubt reflects my time of life with its deepening sensitivity to bodily alteration and decay. But I also feel something more impersonal at work: a historical context that subtly determines the painting and the viewing. Stuart Hall might call it, simply, “ the present conjuncture,” a constellation of forces we can’t yet name. Or perhaps a “ crisis” which, according to Gramsci, “ consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the

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new cannot be born.” “ In this interregnum,” he warned, “ a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” I don’t think I need to enumerate the morbid symptoms of our current situation, a time prophetically evoked by Norman O. Brown in the title of his final book: Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis. Luca’s dying/living portraits express, for me, this double transformation. 2018

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Jonathan K. Crary

Many thanks Luca, for this image! What you’ve accomplished is enormously impressive. I’m gratified to have been included in the project and honored to be in the company of thinkers and writers from whom I’ve learned so much. 2019

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Simon Critchley Troppo Vero

Velazquez painted a famous portrait of Pope Innocent X that hangs in the Galleria Doria-Pamphlili in Rome. When the far from innocent looking Pope saw Velazquez’s painting, he reportedly said ‘troppo vero’, meaning both too true and too much truth. There is perhaps an excess of truth in good portraiture. What always fascinates me in gazing at the painted faces of others is a kind of silence and immobility in the face that seems to operate at two levels. On the one hand, a portrait is an image in a world of images, a tiny, almost magical fetish in a phantasmagoria of commodified images that can be bought and sold. But, on the other hand, a portrait – if it arrests and obsesses us – is something more, something deeper and darker that seems both concealed and revealed by the painted surface. When we look at a portrait, I think we look for something about ourselves in the image, some form of identification that draws us in. But an arresting portrait also lets us see through the face, the skin, the eyes towards something captivating and alien. A portrait, then, has a double resonance: it is both identifying and alienating, showing the essential alienation that subtends the circulation of images. At the most superficial level, a portrait is an image of a face that causes a sensation upon the retina which we may find pleasing or displeasing. But, it is my conviction that there is the suggestion of something in

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portraiture that exceeds the sensible content of the image. There is the adumbration of an inaccessible interiority, a reality that resists simple commodification, an atmosphere, something like Orpheus looking over his shoulder as Eurydice slips back into Hades. Of course, matters become a little more complex when it is a portrait of ‘oneself’. In thanking Luca for his beautiful portrait, I am inclined to follow Pope Innocent X and say, ‘too much truth’. I must confess that when I look at this portrait, I don’t know who that person is. When I look at ‘myself’ all I see are others staring back at me. I see my mother’s slightly frightened, anxious but kind eyes, my father’s huge ears and a twist in my nose from where I was badly beaten up by three boys when I was 16 years old. And sweet baby Jesus, whatever happened to my hair. My dad had tons of hair. I think I went bald deliberately to get back at him. Or my mother. I see that stupid black t-shirt that I bought from American Apparel for $20. When I look, I also think about the context for the image the portrait is based on: it’s an image capture from a series of video interviews I did with a website in Chelsea. The room was tiny and hot and I was sweating and being bombarded with questions I didn’t want to answer. But, to tell the truth, I look at that face and those eyes and I feel scared - troppo vero, troppo vero. I want to avert my eyes. It is for other people to tell me what they see. I just see an idiotic me that I’d like to flee. 2013

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Thomas Crow

A project in portraiture of the scope and generosity undertaken by Luca Del Baldo prompts reflection on what exactly has happen to the painted portrait in our time. Its contemporary practice might be characterized as at once ubiquitous and nearly invisible. The trade in painted portraits is as extensive as the pretension and vanity of the powerful can take it. And in our historical moment, those collective vices are nearly infinite. But that boardroom demand for the honorific, gilt-framed likeness is satisfied by a legion of practitioners largely unknown to anyone but their agents and clients. No matter what skill might be manifested in the corridors of power, it will never trouble the awareness of the visitor to a museum of modern art. The bespoke likeness is deemed not so much below the level of fine art as outside and irrelevant to the category as such. Only on rare occasions, when the sitter or sitters stand out sufficiently from the routine, does the portrait cross over to fine art and its maker stand revealed as artist of consequence. Such was the case in the valedictory portraits of Barack and Michelle Obama, unveiled to an outpouring of public emotion in 2018, the former by Kehinde Wiley of the first African-American President in a seated posture within an enveloping backdrop dense with leaves and flowers, the latter by Amy Sherald, who posed the face and torso of the former First Lady atop a pyramid of fabric embellished with abstract motifs at once folkloric and

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modernist. The skeptical critic Ben Davis marveled: “ As rare as it is for the debut of any artwork to be a political event, it might be rarer still for the completion of a presidential portrait to be an artistic event.” Ceremonial portraits of worthies distinguished by the holding of an office are of course far from rare in the ranks of distinguished old-­ master paintings. Think only of the likenesses of Popes from Raphael through Titian through Velazquez through, for that matter, Francis Bacon. Without the self-regard of municipal officeholders in the Netherlands, our legacy of portraits by Hals and Rembrandt would be much poorer; the Night Watch is nothing but such an exercise. But with rare recurrences like the Obama likenesses, this sort of commissioned commemoration has effectively dropped out of fine art, and with it most painted representation of named individuals altogether. Putting the seal on this seeming historical tide away from the portrait on canvas has been the more recent revival of the genre with the vogue for largescale color photography. The chief exceptions to this tendency have entailed a conspicuous absence of monetary exchange between artist and sitter. In a portrait by Bacon, Alice Neel, David Hockney, or Alex Katz, the implied trans­ action is rich in implication but at the register of emotional bonds or other circuits of fellow feeling, into which the spectator as a third party is invited to enter. Such vicarious participation entails conjectures about the unknowable, few onlookers being privy to the intangible currencies that will have passed between maker and subject, with none wholly able to join in. Luca has short-circuited such ambiguities by his wonderfully generous revival of barter as his medium of exchange. Perhaps better to call it the gift economy. For a few words on the page like these, each of his subjects gains an acutely particularized translation of a routine photographic headshot into a splendid interlace of painted marks, one that reconstitutes the self you thought you were seeing. He revives as well the super-genre of the single artist’s portrait gallery, possibly not witnessed since Thomas Lawrence undertook the dozens of likenesses that would populate the Waterloo Chamber at Windsor Castle. Lawrence garnered a fortune, not to mention a knighthood, from the British Prince-Regent by depicting the individual agents of European reaction who had combined ingloriously in the defeat of Napoleon and the French Empire. As no one of them, Wellington

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included, measured up to the personal force of their adversary, it was thought that all combined might strike the right balance. The exploits memorialized by Luca only entailed confrontations with legions of paintings (a fair number of them representing Napoleon) across the museums and great houses of the world. Do all those canvases, one wonders, mark the faces of those who have spent so much of their lives staring into them? It is tempting to imagine an affirmative answer and embroider one’s likeness with anecdote in order to align the portrait with the vocational pursuit to which Luca has paid such great respect. Absent an especially significant event tied to the occasion, however, a subject’s supplementary revelation of personal details risks distraction from the singular intensity of his painting. I am only tempted to savor his heightening the marks of sun and age etched across the rounded features inherited from my grandmother Helen Puckett, born in the tall-grass prairie hamlet of Tampa, Kansas at the end of the nineteenth century, at a time when the great bison herds were a fresh living memory (the last census counted its population as 110 persons). Can I see back through time to the visage of Thomas Jefferson Puckett, Virginian volunteer in the Continental Army during the American War of Independence – or beyond him the John Henry Puckett who had emigrated to the colony from Dorset a century before? Of course, I would like to think so, Luca’s gift, in both senses, being to bestow on a face the depth in history we all carry. 2019

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Arthur C. Danto Three Careers

In consequence of luck and longevity, I have had three overlapping careers. The first career, that of an artist, was facilitated by the circumstance of serving as a soldier for nearly four years in World War II. The experience helped straighten out the muddle of my youth, but practically, I benefited from the GI Bill of Rights, under which I had four years of free tuition at whatever university would have me. In Detroit, where I grew up, culture was embodied in two white marble buildings, the main library of Detroit, and, across Woodward Avenue, the Detroit Museum of Art. Wayne University was a constellation of buildings behind the library. But for as long as I can remember, I wandered the galleries of the various collections, and decided early on that I would be an artist, so really, the DIA, as it now is called, gave me my education. The art program at Wayne in those years was fairly bland, but the remarkable collection of German Expressionist art, and particularly the prints made by Schmidt-Rottluff, Kokoschka, Pechstein, Nolde, and the others, were my texts. I began to carve the end-pieces of fruit boxes, and taught myself printmaking. I did some painting but I had no gift for color. I did, however, show the woodcuts at a gallery on West Grand Boulevard. And I submitted my prints to national and international exhibitions, which landed them in important collections. I completed my education in two years, since I was given credit connected with my military service. I had learned French in Morocco, Italian in Italy, where

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I made the landings near Battipaglia before being taken in trucks to Naples. The Germans had moved out, but forced a battle in Monte Cassino. I had two years remaining on the GI Bill, so I decided to move to New York and (this is characteristic of my life) I decided to use the time to study philosophy. As an artist, I had little difficulty finding galleries in New York, and Columbia accepted me on probation, since I had not been able to take the introductory course in philosophy at Wayne. I also applied to NYU (New York University), which would turn me down unless I took sixteen hours of undergraduate work. Naturally I chose Columbia despite the probation, though I have to admit that I was pretty much at sea. As there was little likelihood of my becoming a professor anyway, I learned what I could, meanwhile building my art career. I thought I would probably wind up an art teacher somewhere, though my work was bought and shown and reviewed. I studied with Susanne Langer, the author of Philosophy in a New Key. Her mentor, Ernst Cassirer, who had come to Columbia as visiting professor, died abruptly in front of the faculty as he turned to answer a student’s question, and the department appointed Susanne to finish his courses. She was attractive and European, and entered the classroom with a cello. I wrote a paper on Kant’s third Critique for her, which she liked a great deal. But the department was not especially supportive of her, since she was a woman. Male professors of no great distinction said that women were just not able to do philosophy. But in truth, I must admit, I could see very little connection between the philosophy of art, as written by philosophers through the ages, and the great art, that was displayed in the few galleries that promoted Abstract Expressionism – Betty Parsons, Sidney Janis, and Samuel Kootz were the main sponsors. In April 1949 there was an article in Life magazine on Jackson Pollock, whom it implied was the greatest living artist. That article was what drew me to New York. I decided to superimpose Pollock’s style on the German Expressionist style I had adopted. But I found that I had a gift for philosophy, and began to publish articles in Mind, The Journal of Philosophy, the Review of Metaphysics etc. I wrote a worthless dissertation. I wanted to do a piece of real philosophy, but I was not yet up to that. I certainly had no interest in writing on aesthetics, since it had so little to do with the art that engaged me. I got interested in the philosophy of history, and applied for a Fulbright Fellowship in the first year that they were

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offered, and won a year in Paris, where I naturally got interested in Existentialism. Paris was pretty much the same as it was entre les deux guerres. Naturally, I wore a beret. Meanwhile, the universities, which expanded to accommodate veterans, were hiring teachers, and I was able to find a job at the University of Colorado. I found two recently hired philosophers, Christopher Jackson, who was a student of Gilbert Ryle, and John Nelson, who was a student of Norman Malcolm, a student of Wittgenstein. I learned analy­ tical philosophy from them, which I knew nothing about from the classes at Columbia. That really was my philosophical education, since Malcolm sent us mimeographed copies of the Blue Book, the Brown Book, and mathematical notes by Wittgenstein, and we studied these together. Unfortunately, the job lasted only a year. The veterans had run out, which coincided with a generation of students born at the height of the Depression. Back in New York, I completed my dissertation, and had a piece of exceptional luck. I met one of my professors, Justus Buchler, in the bookstore. He offered me a job teaching the great general education course, Contemporary Civilization. I phoned my wife, Shirley Rovetch, who had stayed in Detroit, to tell her that I had a job at Columbia. She told me that she was pregnant. Any job was precarious until one had tenure, but I jammed my foot in the door and received tenure in 1961. We took our two daughters, Elizabeth and Jane, to Paris. France was at war with its colony, Algeria. Sometimes the Seine carried the bodies of Algerians, killed by the OAS (The Secret Army Organization), who also blew up buildings around St-Germain, and began to use torture in Algiers. It was no place for children, so we drove south to the Côte d’Azur, where we found a marvelous villa on the Escalier de la Gendarmerie. I wrote my first book, Analytical Philosophy of History there. Once finished with that, we moved to Rome, where we found an attico on the Via Fogliano. I spent time in the German library, reading the bound volumes of Nietzsche’s correspondence, which led to my second book, Nietzsche as Philosopher. Both books were published in 1965. I loved writing books. At the meeting of the American Philosophical Association, someone asked if I was really publishing two books. He said he supposed they were anthologies, and I answered that they were real books. I felt that the era of articles was coming to an end.

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But in 1964, I wrote an essay, The Art World. It raised but hardly answered the question of the difference between artworks and real things, whether they look indiscernible. The question arose with Andy Warhol’s show at the Stable Gallery, which consisted of copies of grocery boxes, and most particularly the Brillo Boxes, which captured my imagination. That essay changed the direction of aesthetics, but I would not write further on the subject until 1978, the year Shirley died. The mid-sixties were a very productive time, roughly my fortieth year, which the ancients considered the prime of life. I decided to carry forward a somewhat Hegelian agenda: to write a five-volume work on analytical philosophy. The unifying concept was that of representation. Analytical Philosophy of History introduced what I termed “ narrative sentences.” They accounted for the difference between stages of culture – between the Age of Enlightenment and Modernism – though there was no physiological difference between persons in the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. But I also developed a philosophy of action and a philosophy of knowledge. The fourth volume would be on art and the final volume on mind. So when I entered the Stable Gallery, my head was full of advanced philosophy, by contrast with any art historian in the world. By the time I was ready for my book on art, I was tired of what was happening in analytical philosophy. I called my book The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, a title I encountered in a novel by Muriel Spark. Basically it advanced a definition of art as an embodied meaning. It became a basis for a whole new way of thinking, and has been translated into seventeen languages. The Transfiguration brought another piece of luck. Betsy Pochoda, who had returned to The Nation magazine, after a stint at Vanity Fair. The Nation is the oldest magazine of opinion in the United States, and from the beginning published art criticism. Frederick Olmsted, the visionary designer of Central Park, was one of its first art critics. Clement Greenberg wrote for it in the Forties. Its critic Lawrence Alloway had gotten sick, and no one replaced him. When Betsy returned, she was bent on Lawrence, and asked around for suggestions. Ben Sonnenberg, the editor of Grand Street, suggested me. Betsy phoned one day, and invited me to write about art for the magazine. I had never thought of writing criticism, but of course I said “ Yes!” I reviewed a wonderful show at the Whitney Museum: Blamp! New York Art 1957-1964, and Betsy murmured

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“ What a thrill!” when she read it. It was great to be paid for writing, and for prompt publication. I was the art critic for the next twenty-five years. Most critics in New York were extremely conservative. John Canaday and Hilton Kramer at the New York Times were savage. Time magazine hissed at Jackson Pollock. My interest was in the new, as in the movements of the Sixties: Fluxus, Pop, Minimalism, and Conceptual Art, after which movements more or less vanished, and interest turned to single individuals who were thought to be promising. My interest was in explaining the new work, which brought an artworld readership to the magazine. I loved being a critic, and feel that the essays I published, combined with The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, is what I shall be remembered for when I am gone. If one lives long enough and has a bit of luck, everything works out. A distant colleague in the American Society of Aesthetics, the Polish aesthetician Ewa Boltuc, is a print collector as well as a philosopher. She spotted one of my prints for sale on the internet, and wrote me about it. I invited her to stop by when she next came to New York. Ewa was very taken with the work, and, as a woman of action, organized an exhibition at the museum at her university in Springfield, Illinois. That is not far from the University of Illinois, whose director, Randy Auxier, went to see that show, and decided that his museum must have it. All that took place in 2010. Randy felt that some of my work should be printed in the forthcoming book, The Philosophy of Arthur C . Danto. I at first resisted, arguing that the art had nothing to do with philosophy. But in the end, I came around. In 1962, I had dismantled my studio, and devoted myself to philosophy and later to criticism. But the director of the collection at Wayne State asked me to make a gift of my woodblocks, which had been gathering dust for half a century. I gladly donated them. I certainly have neither the strength nor the drive to do art any longer. But it is part of what I am, along with the rest. For some while, I have been in correspondence with Luca Del Baldo, a remarkable artist. In fact I believe him to be the greatest portraitist in the world. He did an astonishing portrait of me, and all who saw it were astonished. He has now undertaken to do portraits of philosophers of art, and to publish these portraits in a book, to accompany an exhibition. I have seen several of the portraits by now - of David Carrier, Hans

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Belting, Richard Shusterman, and Lydia Goehr. All of these have captured their expressions beyond the possibility of photography. I am thrilled to have been witness to this outpouring of great painting, and I would like to do what I can to give his work the recognition it deserves. Whoever sees these heads, luminous with truth, will acknowledge Del Baldo’s exceptional gifts. 2010

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Mike Davis

A comfortable old shoe of a mug. An unremarkable face that you won’t pick out of a crowd or, hopefully, a police line-up. Ordinary, well-aged and, of course, largely inscrutable to me. I once had a friend – no, she was far more than that – who was a brilliant psychoanalyst and despite her efforts to keep analysis out of our relationship, she was once blurted out. “Do you know what your real problem is?” “ Don’t have a clue,” I chuckled, thinking she was about to kid me. “ All the men in your family have always been failures.” “ What?” Where the hell did this remark come from at breakfast on a gorgeous California Sunday? I was annoyed. “ Ok, tell me how to be successful, Ms Freud.” “ In the first place, you need to have a persona. Do you even know what that is?” In truth, I didn’t have a clue. But when she explained, I was flabbergasted. No, I guess I didn’t have a ‘persona’, although it was clear that she did. The instant that this tough, ribald and loveable kid from the Bronx walked into her office she put on a mask of cool, transfiguring solemnity. It was both a projection of her profound seriousness about her work and a way of reassuring patients, mainly young women who carried images of analysts as grey-bearded father figures, that she had the mojo they needed. Moreover her skill at enacting this persona enforced respect from the greybeards and obnoxious academics who were her colleagues. ‘You were boucoup witchdoctor tonight,’ I’d tell her

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after a lecture or meeting. ‘Try it yourself,’ she’d reply dryly. It was not an act. Years later, after innumerable failures, all of which seemed to confirm the curse on my male line, I published a notorious book on Los Angeles that gathered some attention. Amongst other things I had written about the police abuse and community anger that were on the verge of blowing up the city. After the 1992 eruption, the New Yorker called me out of the blue and asked if I’d be willing to spend a few days taking Richard Avedon to the parts of LA that were invisible from Mulholland Drive. He had a date to photograph Ronald Reagan but was also hoping to meet some activists in Southcentral L.A. He turned out to be fearless, charming and disarmingly kind, qualities that rapidly put at ease the very formidable people that I introduced him to. They agreed to a group photograph. The shoot was scheduled one evening in the same studio where Reagan had been photographed earlier in the day. (The resulting photo was a classic Avedon shocker, the first time the public had seen the full extent of the ex-President’s dementia and mental vacancy.) I was very nervous about how he would frame this group of hard men, the protagonists of a gang truce that was close to being a social miracle. There was of course already a hyperbolic and exploitative stereotype on numerous book and CD covers; the Original Gangster (OG) with tatooed bicepts like sequoia trunks holding an Uzi. Avedon might be a world-famous master, but would he not succumb to the same temptation? My anxiety was unnecessary. With the usual tinkering that a group photo requires, he finally had everyone in the position he wanted and his tripod-mounted Mathew Brady-era box camera carefully focused. The composition was instantly familiar and totally surprising: it resembled Rodin’s ‘Burghers of Calais.’ Confronted with various sensational possibilities he had chosen instead to focus on what he perceived as their true persona: the dignitas of community leaders in a time of great danger. The photo is part of his unpublished legacy, but will someday, I believe, be regarded as an icon of hopes arising from ruins. As a portraitist Luca Del Baldo faces a more difficult challenge than Avedon did. The latter could observe his subjects for several days, form impressions of their characters and then experiment with compositions in a studio setting (with the signature Avedon white sheet in the

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background). Luca works from a found object – in my case a literally random photo, the only recent one I could locate. Then by some mysterious process that I assume includes some familiarity with the subject’s writing and probably a hypothesis or two about their character, he gives back to them their enigma, partly interpreted perhaps, but also overlaid with new questions. In my case, the question of persona remains, in the dual sense of performed self and earned character, but I won’t venture an opinion because I’m obnoxious when I think about myself. Moreover, I’ve been battling cancer for two years and understand that what will abide is the love that I have planted in my children’s hearts and hopefully the encouragement that I’ve given to young people to fight capitalism for the sake of human survival. Still wouldn’t we all like to become one of those old photographs at a rummage sale that someone picks from the pile and says ‘Hm, wonder what this cat was like?’ 2018

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Ronald De Sousa Of Portraits and Time

The great neurologist Eric Kandel, commenting on his book on the neuroscience of art, was recently quoted as saying: “ portraits are never objects simply perceived. They are more like a dangerous animal at a distance – both perceived and felt.” Indeed, they may be dangerous in different ways for painter, viewer and sitter. The last time I had my portrait painted, I was 11 years old, and sitting for a portrait felt as demanding as sitting through a piano lesson, where self-presentation was equally important (“ I’ll overlook wrong notes or dirty fingernails,” my teacher warned, “ but not both!”). Inevitably, it brings out a sitter’s narcissism. At my age, however, as Michel Leiris once pointed out, the danger of narcissism takes the form of a fascination with every sign of encroaching decrepitude. That is one way that portraits are all about time. (For me, perhaps this is because if I haven’t given a thought to time and death in the last day, I feel a slight pang of guilt, as if I had been culpably oblivious of a lover.) But that is not the only way portraits are about time. For the painter the danger is that the instant captured is only a lifeless instant. The brain is cunningly fashioned to interpret a two dimensional array as representing three-dimensional space. Natural selection engineered that: but only art, and never nature, can have trained us to apprehend a perfectly still image as representing a life that exists in time. The best portraits suggest not stillness but transition, between the previous and the next unseen moment. By doing that,

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a good portrait also meets another, more insidious challenge: in its stillness, a portrait aspires to be the way someone looks: time in its fullness frozen in an istant, in the sense captured by Mallarmé’s famous line in his “ Tombeau d’Edgar Allan Poe”: Tel qu’en lui même, enfin l’éternité le change. But no viewer wants to see, frozen for eternity, merely an instant in a person’s life – and no sitter wants to be so limited. Despite the captivating character of Nietzsche’s thought experiment about Eternal Recurrence (or Hirokazu Koreeda’s After Life), it is not because of the tedium of repetition that the prospect seems horrific – for recurrence, unlike repetition, will be new every time. It is rather because the love of life is the love of its ephemeral dynamism. Luca meets all those challenges of temporality, by choosing an instant that is not an instant, but the suggestion of a transition, of dynamic process. He has me about to speak, while at the same time hesitating about what to say, or about whether it is worth saying, or perhaps worrying whether my interlocutor wants to hear it. In other words, by showing so vividly a moment of transitional thought, he has conspired to let his subject escape time, by fixing him in time, just so. 2012

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Samuel Delany

Dear Luca – Choosing me to be part of your project is an honor and humbling. Forgive my responding to you with a series of notes and fragmentary thoughts. It is an old form going back, as you know, to Heraclitus, or perhaps the historical accidents that produced the fragments we have of his Peri Physeos, which is the form in which it has come down to us. I do not have the excuse of history having destroyed any original text here: I confess that, at my current age, I find it harder and harder to think in coherent arguments. For all I know, it may be medical. In my case, I can say very easily I am doing it because it is easier, and the history of philosophy has left me an easier form to play with. 1. As complimentary as it is to be included in your project, I don’t think of myself as an important critic of anything else other than possibly science fiction – and certainly not a philosopher! On a couple of occasions, I have written about philosophers and fantasized about works they might have written, in books such as The Mad Man and The Atheist in the Attic, and even conversations they might have had, but that’s as close to it as I come. A favorite quote from Auden in The Age of Anxiety is: “ Human beings are, necessarily, actors who cannot become something before they have pretended to be it; and they can be divided, not into

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the hypocritical and the sincere, but into the sane who know they are acting and the mad who do not.” The closest I’ve ever gotten to being a philosopher was pretending to be a philosopher when I was writing fiction about them. Even if I don’t deserve to be among the people you have chosen, I think it’s a wonderful project. 2. I wonder if you could send the original portrait to the Beinecke, where my archive is currently stored. This has nothing to do with not liking the painting but because I have never trusted myself to take care of actual objects. Here in Philadelphia, I’ve seen too many apartments of elderly people who died that were emptied out, and everything in them – paintings, papers, furniture, musical instruments – tossed into dumpsters. Only recently I learned that all the paintings that had been stored in the basement of an artist, whom I knew in New York and who eventually moved to Vancouver at the end of the ’60s, whose work, I thought, would one day grace some museum wall, had been cleaned out and carried off to a garbage pit because nobody knew what to do with it and nobody actually wanted it, though had I known, I probably would have taken them all into my house.1 Simon Kestenbaum, Renie Perkins, a painter whose studio on 104th St. I used to visit and watch him work named Al, Tony Calone (a 25-year-old artistic genius who died of a heroine overdone and whose family threw out all his paintings), and Russell FitzGerald, who, for a number of years, was the lover of Jack Spicer and then took for his living partner Dora Dull and her two twin daughters by the poet Harold Dull, and the two of them eventually moved from the Lower East Side, where I’d met them, to Vancouver, where, once, I got to visit them. Once, after his death, I got to go to Vancouver with a bunch of friends, where we saw an extraordinary exhibit of his paintings, which had been curated by his wife, Dora, and a young Native American with whom she was living, in a gallery not far from her house. The paintings still belonged to her and had been stored in her basement. As far as I can tell, at some point she was later evicted from her home when she was in her eighties, and, with her only having minimal help from friends, everything in the house was eventually taken to a garbage disposal. Perhaps someone had pictures of the paintings (but who I do not know, though I’ve emailed a couple of people to find out), but the originals apparently have long vanished. If you look Russell up online,

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the only examples of his art are four book covers (and three magazine covers) that he did for books of mine. What should be done with paintings in order to preserve them? Literally I do not know. In the hall of my old building, at 1123 Spruce St., was an oil painting by José Puyet, who actually has a Wiki page, but I have no idea how he got one, and while there are a number of his original paintings online, including another version of the one hanging in our hall and owned presumably by the landlord, I have no idea whether the others still exist or not. 3. (https://i.ytimg.com/vi/KNdd6Ty_CMg/maxresdefault.jpg) This oil painting hung in the downstairs hall of the building I lived in during the time I taught at Temple University (2001–2016) in Philadelphia’s Gayborhood. Its title was Evita, but from the hair style, I always assumed it dated from the late 1920s to the early thirties, and I doubt strongly if it is more than a glancing reference to Evita Paron. Though the painter is, in fact, Spanish, research suggests it was done in the early ’60s. To me, it suggests a picture that hung in a bar and aspired to look forty years older than it was, and “ Evita” is simply a diminutive of “ Eve,” who is pictured with her traditional apple (of the knowledge of good and bad, the tov and the ra), about to offer it to a complicit Adam. It’s also quite possible that the “ glamour” – the veil over her breasts – was painted in later; it certainly looks it, if you stand in front of it. Possibly it’s what allowed it to be brought inside a relatively “ decent” home. The names are printed on the metal plate affixed to the frame [EVITA Puyet]. Until today I knew nothing more about it or the artist. The name – “ Puyet” is the middle name of José Puyet Padilla (April 22, 1922 – August 28, 2004) – carries a vague suggestion of “ Frenchness,” which is in keeping with the aura of sexual transgression about the young woman, with the red flower so richly pictured in her hair. He was born in Málaga, Spain, died in Madrid, where he lived for much of his life. How this particular print on textured canvas ended up in a hallway in Philadelphia is something I will never know. Invisible in the photograph of the copy that hung in the hall of 1123 Spruce St., three wounds have been inflicted on the canvas, probably by a jackknife. From their position, I can imagine them done by an adolescent male sometime between World War II and 1955, though that is only

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speculation. It has hung on the wall downstairs since I first moved in here, back in 2001 or ’02. Again, the fingernails on the hand holding the apple are only suggested, but are still as long as claws, even as they become less and less realistic the closer and closer one looks at them. (Her lips are red, but her nails are not.) It’s a small leap to see them as a visual pun with serpent’s fangs. Wikipedia, however, has this to say: “ José Puyet (April 22, 1922 – August 28, 2004), full name José Puyet Padilla, was a Spanish, modern impressionist painter, whose popularity spread throughout Spain and the United States.  Puyet was born in Málaga, Spain. He was grandson of teacher José Padilla, a Spanish artist who began painting in the nineteenth century.[3] As a child, Puyet learned to paint by watching his grandfather, whose company he preferred to that of children his own age. By age eight, he had started working in pencils and oils. At age 20, Puyet entered the Spanish military, due to World War II, and was sent to the exclave of Melilla. The experience deepened his observations of new personages and atmospheres. His superiors learned of his talent and would often relieve him of guard duty to allow him to create paintings of the families of the High Commanders. Upon his return to Malaga, Puyet ventured out on his own as an inspired artist. He moved to Madrid where he found life difficult. He often shared rooms with truck drivers and whomever else would allow him. He purchased art supplies with the little money he had and painted various scenes of people at work. He also found work painting pictures to decorate crypts and mausoleums, and packaging of perfumes and creams.” From the article and the several images, including this one, probably this is one of several or even many copies of a popular subject. Though I can find images of earlier versions of this one online, none of them carries a date. Earlier versions seem to have done more with the drapery and the hair. And the vandalizing on this one is particularly sad. 4. At the bottom of this (and all) my emails is a link to my website: www.samueldelany.com. If you scroll down the “ Biography” section, eventually you will see a portrait of me, by a young artist today in his early 50s, Gregory Frux,

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who started the painting in the summer of c. 1984, at my 5th-floor apartment in New York City, entirely from live sittings, four- to sixhours a piece, followed by 30 or 35 Wednesday afternoon sittings, of about an hour or two each for the next three months. There were no photographs of the portrait until after the portrait was done. Eventually the portrait was donated to the Fales Library at New York University in NYC, where it hangs in hallway leading to the office of Marvin Hamlin (where one has to ask to see it. Itis not on display for the public). It was the second portrait in oils that had ever been done of me – though there have been five since, including yours. The first, by Claudi Logan, is reproduced in my journals (facing page 312). (Another oil sketch by commercial artist Jack Gaughan is on the book jacket of the hardcover of my autobiography, The Motion of Light in Water, and was owned by David Hartwell.) The second changed the way I look at all portraits: till that time I had assumed that the portraits that I saw in museums were basically works that were the equivalent of short stories. Once I sat for my own portraits and realized all the thought and work both of us – Greg and myself – put into the project, I started thinking of portraits from life as works closer to entire novels. You might find it interesting to look at. Again, just go to my website and click on “ Biography.” 5. Things I didn’t want to say about the Frux portrait until after you’d seen it (or a reproduction of it). There’s a great deal of symbology in the portrait: the hands “ quote” the “ hand of God” (the one on the Kaypro IV computer keyboard) from Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam and the “ hand of Adam” (hanging over the back of my chair), only they are pointing away from each other, not toward each other. I think it’s fascinating that you “ recognize” it as my work environment because the one thing left out of the Frux portrait (and also the element left out of your own portrait) is the books that were visible in both – if the portraits had been more realistic. In your own portrait, there is also a missing light switch that controls the illumination of the scene that makes work possible for much of the day, especially in winter. Greg spent as much time on the reflection on the black window glass as he did on my figure facing the front, but what I think of when I remember that window is the wildly contrasting views visible through it

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during the day (trees, tenement brick walls, fire-escapes and laundry lines …) and the extremely different view during the night, when much of that was invisible, which included the skyline of the city, showing the twin towers of the Beresford, where my then lover’s older brother, songwriter Tony Romeo, lived and had his Christmas parties every year, where we went one Christmas Eve and met Chita Rivera and her entire sprawling family. (Frank was all but homeless when I met him on an incredibly rainy Bastille Day, in the back of the Variety Photoplays movie theater, a theater where many gay men went to cruise, including David Wajnorovich[sp?], who did some drawings of the chairs in the back balcony, which, when I saw them in one of his little books [I used to own half a dozen of his volumes], I instantly recognized.) The objects on the writing desk in the Frux painting – the text stand, the egg-timer (that is, a small hour-glass that measures life in three-­ minute units …), the airmail letter, the scholarly off print, etc. – are all there for symbolic purposes and have little to do with how I write or even rewrite … Because I no longer have my library, I can’t check this, but there is an essay by the German born “ American” critic, George Steiner, about a genre painting by Chardin, Philosophe lisant (The Philosopher Reading), that influenced a lot of how I set up the “ work space.”2 In both Greg’s painting and yours, I am much more aware of what is not shown – the books, the real technology of the working environment. I am reminded once again of my artist friend Russell FitzGerald, when I would sit in his studio and write in my notebook, working on my novel Nova. He was working at the time on a very large painting called Gutterdämmerung and another that entailed a great bird. He explained that he had to paint every single feather in the visible parts of the wing, because you could see them all, and how exhausting (and boring!) it was going to be. But he did it, and it was very visually impressive, as well as a very exciting painting – It was one of his paintings that was eventually destroyed because, after his death, there was nowhere to store it. 6. I have always been taken by the mystery of titles. La Geste d’Asdiwal, Levi-Strauss’s study of a Tsimshian Indian myth recorded in four versions by Franz Boaz becomes a typical example of his own method of reading myths as Christopher Johnson’s reading of Derrida’s reading of

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an analysis of a chapter from Tristes Tropiques becomes an exemplary example of Derrida’s own reading method. Equally suggestive has been the title The Tractatus, which since 1922 has been the name, for most of us, of Wittgenstein’s seminal singular work, Tractatus Logico-Philoso­ phicus, which Wittgenstein borrowed from Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologicus-Politicus, the former also borrowing the latter’s numbering system, which itself suggests a simplification of “ the geometric method” from Spinoza’s own Ethica. (A later work would be put together from his notes numbered by the editor from his surviving notes, by Rush Rhees and G. Elizabeth Anscombe: I have great sympathy for the closing sentences of Wittgenstein’s own Preface from 1945, six years before his death: “ I should have liked to produce a good book. This has not come about, but the time has passed in which I could improve it.”) The hard-edged totality that Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures suggested in 1957, when all of these works first impinged on my own consciousness, is another example. Your title, Visionary Academy of Ocular Mentality, is another such that glitters with possibility, along with its attendant mystery. I wish I had more of a grasp of what might complete or conclude my small chapter and contribution to such a work, other than a citation of the poetry of titles, when content over connotation is called for, but connotations are all I have been able to grasp recently, whether of texts in prose or in pigments. I wish my sense of pictures and books were far more substantial than it is. Yesterday and today, I spent hours signing signature pages to be bound into books – in one case, two I had written many years ago, and one in which a story I had written in 1966 was a contribution. As I signed page after page, it occurred to me in both cases I had not the vaguest memory of what any of the three was about, yet at the request of the publishers, I was putting my name to them, as I will soon put my name to this. Because time and accident has ceded us a form that says mimicking the disruption of the expectation of coherent philosophical enterprises is acceptable, whether, like the handful of random objects in which Heraclitus saw beauty when they were strewn on the ground, a handful of fragments strewn on the page to a certain kind of mind can suggest a coherent meditation on what might be left out in a portrait or in a scattering of notes, I cannot say for sure but can only hope that, like seeds tossed in a furrow, with some readers they might sprout.

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“ The most beautiful order of the world is still a random gathering of things insignificant in themselves.” – Heraclitus (Davenport 40, Kahn 125, Curd and McKirahan, Jr., 57, Hermann Diels 124, quoted in Theo­ phrastus Metaphysics 15) 2019

1  Russell FitzGerald (December 29, 1932; Bucks County, Pennsylvania – March 30, 1978; Vancouver, British Columbia). 2  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iwm83_mDOqg.

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Daniel C. Dennett

A portrait is supposed to capture a person at his best, and Luca Del Baldo’s painting does that so well I find myself wishing I could live up to it all the time, because here I appear intensely engaged in discussion without being combative, genial and curious, not derisive or dismissive, and it is clear that I am deeply enjoying the exploration of ideas – with somebody. Philosophy is at its best an interpersonal exploration, not a solitary search for a proof, and the implied presence of the interlocutor makes this a very happy painting. There has never been a better time to be a philosopher of mind. On every side, people are beginning to recognize that some features of our traditional conception of the mind need to be revised, replaced, strengthened, and others need to be abandoned. Cognitive science and evolutionary biology are introducing a host of new and unsettling facts about our brains and how they evolved, and how our social arrangements have also evolved in parallel. Can such a “ naturalized” view of ourselves preserve our sense of meaning, of dignity, of responsibility? There are ethical and legal complications, questions about whether we can have free will if our minds are our brains, questions about the limits of scientific understanding, and these questions are now being asked with great deal of anxiety. For me, it is a pleasure to be able to say that I have been thinking hard about all these questions for over forty years, and have up-to-date versions of answers, ready to hand. The answers I have discovered, and tested extensively,

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are reassuring. YES, the naturalized vision of human life that we are achieving through science can support our most cherished ideals: knowledge and truth, love, responsibility, freedom, and indeed the very meaningfulness of life. We don’t need God, or immaterial souls, or miracles, or some unimaginable exemption from causality to secure our minds as conscious sources of meaningful human action. We can be the authors of our deeds and the masters of our lives. Explaining how the material activities of bodily cells can accomplish the “ magic” of consciousness and secure the varieties of free will worth wanting is a deeply satisfying project, since it goes some way towards completing the grand unification of matter and meaning envisaged by Darwin. 2013

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Darby English

Regarding Luca’s painting, although I am its subject, any comment I might make would be third-hand. I do not trust the kind of knowing we do at third hand, no matter its subject. The truth of the image is firstly Luca’s crafted truth. Secondly it is that of the event photographer (another Italian!) whose work spurred the painter’s first steps. To me, the required comment feels like an invitation to make some effort of compensation. As though the chasm between what I am and what Luca very concretely has made could be crossed and, in the crossing, known. It cannot. 2019

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Johannes Fabian Sans titre

Why me? Much as I am honored to have my portrait included in this illustrious assembly, my first reaction to the title of the project was to wonder why Luca Del Baldo would select me. Beginning in the sixties, when my “ discipline” had to recover from the end of classic colonialism and reestablish its legitimacy as critical anthropology, I have argued, without using the term, that we must overcome an ocular mentality which, had guided, albeit in different ways, theory and method under preceding paradigms, including French and American “ structuralism.” What brought me to take anti-visualist position was not theory but praxis: research based on communication. And how did my antivisualism fit with popular painting becoming such an engrossing project of research? To be honest, I feel more comfortable having my portrait included a “ visionary academy?” Long ago, a critic distinguished “ priests” and “ pro­phets” among social science researchers of religion (another concern of mine). I was honored by being included among the latter. When we ethnographers present our findings we speak out about insights gained from communicating with those we study. For me and others, the evidence on which we base what we have to say (or write) have been re­corded exchanges made into documents (through transcription and translation) as texts.

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Pictures I called that approach “ language-centered” anthropology. Then came what turned out to be a decisive step forward – philosophically, I think of it as a dialectical move. During a project on labor and language in Katanga I discovered the presence and importance of certain objects in the lives of the people I studied: the presence thousands of things/ objects in living rooms, shops, and drinking places in the town where I worked. They came in more than twenty genres (or topics) which made up what I called a regime of memory ranging from things ancestral to things past and things present. Among the about thirty popular painters who produced and sold their picture there was one, Tshibumba Kanda Matulu who broke out of this regime. He defined himself as a historian and painted the history of his country in a hundred pictures. In the years that followed, his oeuvre was shown in several places (most recently in Documenta 14 in Athens). A major exhibition of popular painting was shown in Vienna in 2001. The curators invited me to give talk and here is how I reflected on the occasion in my note book: “March 10, 01. A talk about Tshibumba’s History at the ethnological museum, in wing of the Burg, in a stuffy, airless ball-room, before 30 or 35 people – one could not wish for much more of a challenge when it comes to “ presence and representation.” The exhibition, much criticized and poorly visited, seemed as well done as it is possible. But it makes it clear again, everything that encourages the purely visual reception of these objects makes them present in such a way that they lose their capacity to represent (their makers, the events, the life of which they speak). And that gives an unexpected twist to the problem of presence and representation. The aim (of ethnography) cannot be to dissolve representation into presence any more than to predicate representation onto absence. Did Said realize that the “ Oriental” who is made absent in the theoretical constitution of Orientalism by Orientalism’s tricks of representation is not knowable, not even to himself, except through representation? Must absence be aligned with (be the condition of) representation? Is presence “ representable?” Back to popular painting in Katanga and Tshibumba’s History: A key term that was used commonly in talk about these pictures was ukumbusho, lit. something that causes you to remember or think. As I was told many times, the academic paintings from Lubumbashi (interna-

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tionally known since the 1950s, lack that ability. But once again a sort of dialectic tension was maintained when paintings on the walls were said to be both, reminders of shared memories and things that served to kutengeneza homes, a verb whose translation in my Swahili dictionary I cannot refrain from quoting: “ put right, repair, mend, put in order, arrange, correct, settle, bring to a happy conclusion, make comfortable.” The portrait Of my portrait I have so far only seen images, images of images that reached me via the Internet. I liked what I saw and complimented the artist. But I have yet to hold the painting in my hands, smell it, turn and weigh it before I put it up on a wall to kutengeneza our home. As to what it will do then, the list of meanings I quoted should give us ample food for thought. 2019

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Maurizio Ferraris Facce e idee

Una ventina di anni fa, e anche più, c’era una rivista francese, ”L’Arc”, che usciva con monografie su filosofi e letterati illustri. In copertina, la foto del soggetto del fascicolo. Uscirono Klossowski, Lacan, Foucault (se non ricordo male), e Derrida. Che però all’epoca non sopportava di essere fotografato, o almeno che venissero pubblicate delle sue fotografie. Era un problema, mi spiegò Derrida, perché l’editore era convinto che la foto facesse vendere di più, ma dopo una lunga negoziazione ebbe la meglio Derrida, e il fascicolo uscì con un’incisione che rappresentava un libro e una lucertola; il fascicolo, comunque, si vendette benissimo. Passarono alcuni anni (era il 1976), e Derrida (all’inizio degli anni Ottanta) venne arrestato a Praga con l’accusa di detenzione di stupefacenti, in realtà perché aveva tenuto dei seminari a sostegno di Charta ’77, l’associazione di dissidenti che chiedeva il rispetto del dettato costituzionale. La cosa fece scalpore, intervenne Mitterrand, e Derrida fu liberato e rinviato a Parigi. Il giorno dopo apparve la notizia sul “New York Times”, con una foto di Derrida, e da allora il segreto era rotto, e una valanga di foto di Derrida invasero il mondo, in libri, film, siti. Sin qui la questione della iconofobia di un filosofo. Un caso di psicologia individuale. Ovviamente, però, si chiede di più anche al cronista di questo piccolo aneddoto, ed è legittimo farlo. Per esempio, di spiegare se poi Derida o qualche altro filosofo abbia una faccia che assomiglia

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alle sue idee, e la cosa non è ovvia. Le idee non hanno volto, non sono né grandi né piccole, né colorate o altro. Malgrado questo, non pare così peregrino pretendere di trovare una somiglianza tra le idee e la faccia del loro portatore. Nel senso che non appare così bizzarra (come in fondo dovrebbe esserlo) una frase come “ Non assomiglia alle sue idee”, e si possono persino fare dei paragoni tra filosofi che sono più o meno somiglianti a quello che pensano. In effetti, Derrida assomiglia molto al suo pensiero, e questo lo si può dire di un bel po’ di altri filosofi: Nietzsche, Foucault (l’aria un po’ folle che rivela nella vecchissima edizione Rizzoli di Le parole e le cose), Wittgenstein, Rorty, sono molto somiglianti. Ma è chiaro che si può anche fare il gioco inverso, e sottolineare quante volte non accada. Lo aveva fatto Eco (un altro filosofo molto simile alle sue idee) in una bellissima bustina di Minerva di qualche anno fa, dove notava che Einstein assomiglia a un professore di liceo incline alla bottiglia. Volendo si può continuare. Franz Brentano non assomiglia affatto a un discendente di Aristotele, bensì a un mistico dipinto da Klimt, mentre Quine, in una foto giovanile contenuta nella sua autobiografia, pare un eroe western, e in una foto da vecchio ricorda vagamente Eisenhower. Ma è ovvio che qui ci si fa guidare da elementi esterni, non è la somiglianza con le idee, è solo che del primo sappiamo che è nato a Vienna, e del secondo ad Akron, Ohio. Ma, al di là del catalogo, resta da chiedersi che cosa può significare “assomigliare alle proprie idee”, che si trasforma nell’assunto secondo cui il volto sia lo specchio dell’anima, e soprattutto gli occhi, in cui si manifesta (commentava in un passaggio un po’ gotico Hegel) la notte del mondo. Ci sono tante soluzioni a disposizione, che vanno dalla frenologiae fisionomica biasimate da Hegel all’idea di Kant secondo cui c’è una relazione tra le idee estetiche, che sono solo forma, e le idee della ragione,che non ne hanno alcuna. Non me la sento di prendere posizione in una questione così complicata, ma mi limito a una riflessione. Come ho ricordato un momento fa, può capitare abbastanza spesso che i filosofi assomiglino alle loro idee. Quasi mai, invece, i caratteri, e la stessa vita dei filosofi, assomigliano a quello che pensano, anzi, nella stragrande maggioranza dei casi ne sono l’antitesi. Se anche le facce seguissero questo destino antagonistico, la conclusione sarebbe semplice e banale: I filosofi sono degli ipocriti, predicano bene e razzolano male, o (non è affatto escluso, anzi, è attestato) predicano male e razzolano

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bene. Ma visto che le facce possono assomigliare alle idee, allora ne vien fuori una interpretazione un po’ meno lineare. I filosofi assomigliano a quello che pensano, e la loro faccia lo testimonia, con la paziente rassegnazione di un vegetale. Stessero anche sempre in casa, agirebbero anche in accordo con quel che pensano; solo che, all’uscita della caverna, incontrano qualcosa che gli fa cambiare idea. 2013

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Christopher Finch De la folie

One of the most intriguing commissions in the history of portraiture was initiated in 1822 by Etienne-Jean Georget, a pioneering French psychiatrist who at the time was chief physician at the Salpetrière insane asylum for women in Paris. Georget’s special interest was monomania and he asked Théodore Géricault to paint portraits of individuals suffering from specific disorders ranging from compulsive gambling to a psychotic obsession with kidnapping. The purpose of these paintings seems to have been to serve as a teaching aid that would enable Georget to present the physical characteristics supposedly associated with each distinct type of mania to his students, eliminating the inconvenience of bringing an actual madman to the classroom. Already celebrated for The Raft of the Medusa, Géricault himself had suffered from a nervous disorder and is thought to have been a patient of Georget, who had achieved his own fame with his book De la folie. Géricault made ten paintings in the series. Five have survived, the bestknown being Portrait of a Kleptomaniac, which hangs in the Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent. Painted rapidly and with sublime confidence, it presents a bearded man, dressed, except for a white collar, all in black and with a thatch of un-groomed dark hair. The head is set slightly off center and cocked to one side against a dark background, evoking a sense of unease. The expression on the subject’s face, and his averted eyes, suggest distraction and perhaps confusion, but the portrait con-

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veys a sense of dignity that derives from the artist’s evident respect for his sitter and, perhaps, from the sitter’s determination to be considered worthy of that respect. The painting’s place in the evolution of the history of the intercourse between art and natural science is not in question. That said, does it tell us anything about the nature of kleptomania as Georget had hoped? A partial answer may be found in the fact that when it was acquired by the Ghent museum in 1908 it was assigned the rather more dramatic title Portrait of an Assassin. *** Almost two hundred years after Géricault made these paintings, Luca Del Baldo has embarked on a remarkable project, The Visionary Academy of Ocular Mentality, which has something in common with Georget’s concept. Like Georget, he has chosen a group of monomaniacs to be represented as portraits. Unlike Georget, he has not made his choice based on presenting unique instances of various manias, but rather has selected multiple examples of a single disorder – the compulsion to hurl oneself into the rivers and oceans of art and attempt to swim, or at least stay afloat. Critics, art historians, philosophers of art all suffer from this irreversible condition and are quite unable to prevent themselves from facing the risk of drowning in the tidal race of semiotics, or joining the skeletons washed up on the outer banks of conceptualism. If to become mad is to lose one’s mind, they seem to proclaim, then what better place to lose it than amongst the canals of 15th century Bruges, the mountain streams of Sung Dynasty China, the back­waters of 1960s SoHo, or some other available Arcadia. Luca is uniquely equipped to portray men and women carried away by passion and delusions, having the ability to cast himself as both artist and alienist. Like Géricault, he is possessed by the urge to paint the seemingly unpaintable. His portraits of the dead and sometimes mutilated monsters of the recent past – Rasputin, Mussolini, Trotsky, Rudolf Hess, Saddam Hussein, Muamar Qadhafi and more – suggest that he might well be capable of his own Raft of the Medusa. This is equally apparent in his paintings of deceased clerics – Padre Pio, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Papa Wojtyla – always shown with the Apes of God in close

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attendance. More relevant to The Visionary Academy of Ocular Mentality, perhaps, is a portrait of the murdered and brutalized Pier Paolo Pasolini. It reminds us that artists and thinkers too can meet violent ends, especially if their beliefs are cut from the same visionary cloth as their art. It’s to be hoped that none of Luca’s current subjects suffer Pasolini’s fate. They have enough to cope with without that. To begin with they are haunted by the suspicion that nobody is listening to them. This is a form of paranoia common to writers and teachers, and one that has profound consequences. As Wyndham Lewis, a paranoid of some stature, once observed, “ Many great writers address audiences who do not exist; to address passionately, and sometimes with very great wisdom people who do not exist has this advantage – that there will always be a group of people who, seeing a man shouting apparently at somebody or other, and seeing nobody else in sight, will think it is they who are being addressed.” Lewis was that rarity, a prominent visual artist who was also a gifted novelist, which reminds us that the two disciplines are not incompatible. Géricault’s paintings of the insane beckon us into a Balzacian world larded with compulsion and tragedy. I like to think of The Visionary Academy of Ocular Memory as a kind of collaborative metafiction, with visual and literary components, such as might have been conceived by Um­berto Eco. It is a frittata of a narrative in which the ingredients – some savory, some spicy, some ambrosial – are bound together by Luca Del Baldo’s editorial sensibility and his visionary gifts. He is a master chef who takes the choicest raw materials and permits them to express themselves, knowing that his trust will be rewarded. 2018

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Jerry A. Fodor

Kierkegaard says that the inner is not the outer. If so, then I suppose the portraitist’s task is to portray the latter in a way that exhibits the former. My wife says Del Baldo’s picture looks like me, and I can testify that it looks like what being me feels like, so I count it a thorough success. Much gratitude. 2013

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Hal Foster

I truly hate all pictures of myself. First I don’t recognize them; then when I do see that it is me, I am dismayed. A little like Freud when he catches sight of a nasty old guy on a train, only to discover that it is his own reflection. For Freud there is a touch of the uncanny in this doppelgänger that is himself. For me there is nothing so grand or gothic – just disappointment. Me again? Really? A bit like Gombrowicz’s diary: “ Monday: me. Tuesday: me. Wednesday: me …” I do like Luca Del Baldo’s portrait, though. Maybe because the transformation of photograph to painting allows for a state that is neither live nor dead. For me that ambiguity is essential to the image, essential to the ego. At least it is to any image or ego that I can identify with, that I can recognize. 2019

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Nancy Fraser Critical Theory in and of the Flesh

In Luca Del Baldo’s portrait of me, I see a face, which is recognizably mine, but which confronts me through an extended series of mediations. It is me, to be sure, but me as refracted through the eyes (and hands) of several others. The first and most important other is Del Baldo himself, who materializes his seeing of me through paint on canvas. But he has never laid eyes on me in the flesh. He has painted me, rather, from a photograph. It is one that I sent him myself, as an email attachment, after selecting it from the file of “ publicity shots” stored on my computer. The photograph was taken by another other, Uwe Dettmar, who did meet me face-to-face, but whose work was shaped by institutional imperatives. Dettmar was engaged to produce my likeness for the homepage of the Humanities Research Center in Bad Homburg Germany, which wished to advertise its then-current crop of Fellows, of which I was one. From this photograph, Del Baldo produced a “ me” that amalgamates disparate agendas and ways of seeing, not least his own. It certainly is a likeness of me – and a very good one at that. But the “ me” that appears on his canvas incorporates traces of a larger social world. And that world is quite complex. Comprising individuals, institutions and social relations, it is shot through with orders of normative and aesthetic value, with structures of political economy and power asymmetry.

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I have no doubt that Del Baldo is interested in, indeed playing with, the complexities of representation, He is concerned, it seems to me, with the relation between seeing and thinking. In titling his project “ The Visionary Academy of Ocular Mentality,” he explicitly juxtaposes two registers: on the one hand, the corporeal subject whose visible likeness he creates, a subject with a body and a face, who occupies a specific location in space and time; on the other, the thought that subject germinates, which strives for a disembodied existence that transcends its context of origin. The result is a striking revelation: philosophical reflection issues from embodied individuals. Its transcendence is grounded in immanence. Mind wears a sensuous face. Interestingly, this entanglement of immanence and transcendence is central to the philosophical tradition with which I identify. For Critical Theory, thought necessarily arises from specific historical contexts, which mark it in ways that often escape notice. Often, too, the marking is a kind of warping, which prettifies domination and excuses injustice, even despite good intentions. Exposing such ideological distortion is one of the tasks of Critical Theory, which works in part by excavating the buried threads that tie thought to the social worlds that simultaneously enable and constrain it. But there’s a catch. Critique cannot exempt itself from the suspicion it casts upon others. Cultivating historical self-awareness, it must do its best, which will never be good enough, to guard against its own contamination by the built-in biases of its situation. With respect to itself, then, as well as to others, Critical Theory insists on philosophy’s immanence, its inescapable entanglement with the here-and-now. But there is also another aspect of Critical Theory. Unwilling to abide exclusively in the realm of suspicion, this tradition also affirms transcendence. Rejecting a view of “ the given” as a static, unchanging prison, it seeks out the small shoots and tendrils which, although tethered to the earth, reach out to the sun. In this second register, critique gives voice to hope by disclosing possibilities for emancipation. The possibilities it seeks are not abstract, ideal, or out-of-time, however, not the sort that invite escapism. On the contrary, they are historical possibilities, which emerge from within a social situation that is itself self-contradictory and dynamic. In disclosing those possibilities, Critical Theory links the desire for transcendence with the aspiration to

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overcome domination, while grounding those impulses historically, in a social reality that moves. Much more could (and should!) be said about Critical Theory’s distinctive approach to the co-imbrication of immanence and transcendence. Here, however, I want only to signal its resonance with Del Baldo’s problematic of “ Ocular Mentality.” There too one encounters the peculiar entanglement of soaring thought with fleshly immanence. As I contemplate his portrait of me, however, I struggle to hold those two poles together – because now they are poles of me. I am a philosopher who aspires to clarify the impasses of her time in hopes of discerning a path that leads beyond them. But I am also an embodied natural being with a face. This face is mine alone, but it also speaks volumes about our social world in accents that should be legible to Critical Theory. It is the face of a human animal, white, European-descended, gendered female, middle-aged but healthy looking, reasonably well preserved, and groomed in ways that bespeak nutritional and medical advantages born of the privileges of class, color, and national citizenship. I am flesh, but in my flesh is written an entire history of domination on a global scale. Reading my flesh, I find my voice as a Critical Theorist entangled in a terrible paradox: what enables me to philosophize in relative health and well-being is a social system that methodically strips billions of others of comparable chances. And so, while decoding the fleshly immanence of present-day social reality, I search for signs of hope-inmotion that point beyond it. 2019

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David Freedberg Against Portraiture

I have always been terrified of having my portrait taken. Since I am neither Charlton Heston nor Humphrey Bogart – and certainly not the face that launched a thousand ships – do I really want to see myself in all my physiognomic deficiency? I can scarcely bear to look at a photo of myself, even the handsomest, while Luca Del Baldo’s keen and accurate adaptation of one, which makes me look better than any so far, I have only been able to look at once. For many years – at least ten – I resisted sending Luca a photograph of myself, despite his many courteous requests. In fact, I never did. Of course, this may be my own problem, more for me and my therapist or psychoanalyst than for anyone else. But I persist in the feeling that I am better represented by what I stand for and by my actions than what I look like. To me there has always seemed to be a disjunct between appearance, between inadequate physical resemblance, and the high and lofty aims for which I hope I strive. It is all too easy to understand the sentiment behind the inscription on Dürer’s great portrait of Erasmus declaring that his writings show him better than the image itself, or of the statement beneath his lovely head of Melanchthon to the effect that while Dürer’s skilled hand was able to show the features of the reformer, it could not paint his mind. Indeed, in the portrait of Erasmus it is the words that are framed on the print, not the portrait itself.

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Then too there’s the question of the spoken word. Might this not represent me better than any picture? One remembers the lines of the great Dutch poet Vondel challenging Rembrandt not to be content with just painting the face of the Mennonite preacher Cornelis Anslo, but to paint the voice as well: “ O Rembrandt paint Cornelis’s voice: the visible side is the least of him” the quatrain begins. To know him is to know his words – the words he preaches. It is a plea by a poet for the superiority of language over painting (at least when it comes to best representing someone known for his oratory). So then Rembrandt paints Cornelis with a large bible open in front of him, his mouth just open, his hand gesturing, and his wife, head lightly cocked, wrapt in attention as she listens to him, so that we too seem to hear Cornelis’s voice (even if we do not understand his words). O! What painting and portraiture cannot do! To paint sound – this, of course, was the great achievement of the classical sculptors like Myron, whose cows seemed to moo at their very beholders, as the poets of the Greek Anthology so often reminded one. These may be the usual commonplaces of the comparison between the senses, the paragone between different arts, but in the end Rembrandt’s visual art, his portraiture, trumped all the others. So too, of course, did Dürer’s. Who now remembers the inscriptions on his portraits? Who now can cite more than one line of Erasmus’s writings (even if pressed), or a single word of Melanchthon? But we all remember their faces – and also, perhaps, their garb. Somehow as another old cliché goes, these portraits bring the dead alive; in some way or another, they bring them back to us. And they do so more effectively and more intimately, for the most part, than their writings. But how? How much does it take to do so? Not much. There is, of course, no shortage of precedents. Reservations about portraiture punctuate the history of portraiture, whether in the Hadith, the Talmud or the entire Western tradition. I share them most of them. I feel like a seventeenth-century Jansenist, not so much fearful of emulating God’s unique creative power in making man in his own image, but afraid of the vanity of representing oneself (or of having oneself represented). Perhaps all this is the consequence of having been brought up as a Jew in a Calvinist society, in which resistance to figuring the human face never lay far beneath the surface and aligned one with all those religions that share this resistance.

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Or is it indeed just a matter of vanity, this notion that I am unworthy of being portrayed? After all, there can scarcely be a portraitist in the world who does not understand the difference between verisimilitude in the depiction of outward appearance on the one hand and inner character on the other. Once upon a time, accuracy of physiognomic representation might have been the chief aim of the portraitist (and perhaps it still is in certain quarters), but probably even Jan van Eyck, that absolute master of precision and translucency, would himself have been able to assure me that whatever goodness of character I had would come across in the good portrait, or in this particular depiction of my physiognomy. Accuracy of representation, seeming verisimilitude, need not exclude such goodness. Van Eyck, like many other artists, may not have not scanted the aim of replication of a face in the form of a close mirror likeness, but he would still have recognized that the better part of the sitter was not a matter of pictorial resemblance alone (or at all). As we all know by now, resemblance is not the central issue – except perhaps in the context of crime and the courts. But even then, as we  know from the flaws in the way identities are supposedly established,  perceived resemblance depends on the beholder and on his or her preju­dices. What is at stake is not the illusion of body and person, but the illusion of psyche and soul. That, above all, is what the artist must convey. We may say that we admire the manipulations of paint in Lucian Freud’s fat people, for example, but still we look for more. We seek to discern something about their character. The presence of the soul of the sitter is not the presence of the body of the sitter. It is true that these days, in the age of digitization and the internet, we often find ourselves attempting to ascertain the character or intelligence of a sitter through their image – as, say, in the case of an executive who must make a preliminary assay of character of a number of applicants for a job, or when we ourselves are curious about the character of an artist or writer about whom want to know more (as if that were somehow relevant to their art), or, say, about the personality and ethos of a potential date. Often enough we come to conclusions about character pretty much on the basis of visual appearance alone, as if we still believed in the ancient traditions of physiognomy. But as we frequently learn, sometimes to our own cost, accuracy of judgement about

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such matters is not guaranteed, and we don’t in general align such judgement with esthetic judgement. No one who makes judgements about the character of someone in this way could ever commit to the view that it correlates with the excellence or otherwise of the art. Even though I refused to supply Luca with a photograph of myself, he persisted in his search, found one on his own, and wrought his own magic on my image. “ I have always been terrified of having my portrait taken”, I wrote at the beginning. The notion of having one’s picture taken – to use the English verb – could not be more telling. Many anthropologists will have encountered societies in which people believe that to take a picture of someone is to take their soul away, or even to take possession of it. The literature of the Americas is full of examples. Indeed, anyone who has been to a Native American ritual ceremony will be familiar with this belief. It was one of the burdens of my concern when I wrote about Aby Warburg’s famous expedition of 1895-96 to take photographs of the Hopi peoples (whose looks, as his notes make clear, he so admired). But I am not a Native American, and I could not honestly claim that I am afraid of having my soul taken away from me by the process of image-making. So what really is the root of this resistance to being portrayed? Perhaps in the end, my reservations are indeed too vain and solipsistic. In Luca’s picture of me I don’t like the wrinkles and the bags under my eyes, or the quality and color of my complexion, and I wish my eyes were brighter, more open and clearer; but in aesthetic terms I do indeed marvel – as, say, in the case of Rembrandt – at the tenderness and subtlety of the painting of the bags under the eyes, the impasted areas, the deep furrows across face and brow, the traction of the brush across the wrinkles and in the sagging flesh. I acknowledge the art, and forget what it lacks in terms of accuracy of description, for in this picture art transcends mere flattery. I marvel at it as a work of art, not as a mere representation of the self. It is the art that matters, not the object, or the subject of the object. Indeed, if I take myself out of this portrait, it would be even better – or so I vainly think. But there is more. I don’t think that anyone now believes that art is a matter of illusion (as Gombrich himself once protested to me in horror at this frequent misreading of Art and Illusion). Rather than the illusion of reality, or the tricks of representation in conveying it, what is at

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stake is the illusion of presence – and a particular kind of presence at that: a metaphorical and a metaphysical one, that of the soul. And the presence of the soul of a sitter in a portrait cannot merely be the illusion of their body. There is yet another complex demand upon the maker of the portrait. It is a demand that helps us realize more fully the vanity and solipsism of our dissatisfactions with portraiture, our sense of its deficiency. In the end, portraits are not only for those whom they are of, but for those others whom they are for. They are for friends, for family, for history, for remembrance. They are not just for us, but for others. They make absent friends present; they bring the dead alive for those who come after. One of the foundational ancient and medieval justifications of painting and image-making was that they serve as aids to recollection, and to the fragility and weakness of memory. Erasmus himself wrote vividly of a medallion portrait of his friend Willibald Pirckheimer that such images “ bring my friend Willibald more vividly before me. The medal hangs on the right-hand wall of my bedroom and the painting on the left. Whether I write or walk about, Willibald is always before my eyes – so much so that, even if I wanted to forget him, I could not. But in fact there is nothing which I hold so firmly in my mind as the memory of my friends. And there is something else which pleases me greatly – when my friends come to visit we often begin to talk about you because the portrait is there”.1 Art is for memory but also for conversation. And paintings such as Luca Del Baldo’s remind us not only of the faces of our absent friends, but also of their company, and the kinds of conversation their images still engender. Even though we may prefer to be remembered by our words and our occasional acts of kindness rather than by our features, the power of images, as these portraits show, still brings us closer to who we are, in bono et in malo. Even a single distinctive feature may suffice to remind us of a sitter. But to convey the soul of the sitter we need something more: something that can convey, in the sparest way possible, their character – the face of empathy, say, the gentle smile, the expression of compassion, the willingness to help. This is the great challenge. Visual resemblance counts for little besides this. The artist chooses to extract something noble from what he sees.

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She or he offers cues not plenitude, not visual reflection, but a visual reminder that can be as minimal as it is expansive. What kind of pictures, we may ask ourselves, most successfully do this? The portraits in this book, portraits of people who have sought to understand the mysteries of art all their lives, offer us clues. Let us take them up and consider how they fare as measures of the soul. In them, and in this task, we may discover some larger reasons to set aside my arguments against portraiture. 2020

1  I am grateful to my friends Larry Silver and Shira Brisman, both of whom – through their writings – happened to remind me of these words just as I was concluding this essay.

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Eduardo Galeano

Mi retrato parece, a primera vista, una fotografía. Pero es mucho más: el artista ha logrado retratarme el alma. 2013

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Ivan Gaskell Living or Dead

As we look at one of Luca Del Baldo’s portraits, just what is it we confront? Whatever else, we face a paradox. Del Baldo paints his people as though they are living or as though they are dead, but he paints from neither the living nor the dead person, rather from the chemical embalmment of a photograph. Photography returns at the other end of the process. Most people who come to know Del Baldo’s work in some sense do so as the result of viewing a photographic illustration, whether translated into print or made available on the World Wide Web. Del Baldo’s work as painting is caught between photographs – “ before” and “ after” that work. It risks oblivion in the insubstantiality of electronic data. There is nothing wrong with this. Painters have worked from photographs since soon after they first became available, and Western viewers have accommodated their peculiar range of pictorial effects as somehow normal, reliable, truthful, and inevitable. Painters, and those who seek to disseminate the work of painters, similarly have made photographs of paintings – despite technical challenges – since early in the existence of the medium. The information in a photograph is predictably unreliable when the viewer is aware of the character of the process: as when yellow hues are rendered as a dark tone prior to the introduction of isochromatic emulsions, for instance; or progressive enlargement reveals the regular grid of pixels constitutive of a digital image.

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Yet what is reliable about a painting? And what can a painting reliably convey that remains inaccessible to any preceding indexical registration (an originating photograph) or subsequent derivative (a photogra­ phic reproduction)? Is a painting produced unmediated, from direct observation, and not reproduced, whether photographically or by other means, substantively different from a painting embedded in a matrix of non-painting practices? Yes, it is; but even though received opinion may favor the appearance of directness and freedom from the supposed contamination of the photographic in any of its various forms (think of those who would protect the purity of Vermeer’s paintings from any taint of protophotographic interference) we might, instead, conceive of such a matrix as an enrichment rather than as a diminution of the artwork manifested in the aggregate of its various constitutive forms. This is not to say that a painting unmediated by photography, whether in the very formation of its image or in photographic translation after its making, is necessarily a thing inferior to a painting embedded in such a matrix; just that its matrix is less complex than that of its photographically entangled fellow. If, then, the artwork that includes the painting exists as a complex matrix of conception, preparatory photographs, sketches, memories, painting, variety of reproductions, and further memories, can any of these – and other constituents – be said to have an independent existence? Yes, but not independent of the artwork that they together constitute. Is this really so? If it were, any appreciative viewer of such an artwork would need to take into account each and every constituent – preparatory photographs, sketches, and every reproduction. This is not only a usually impossible feat, but unnecessary as these constituents are of kinds that differ among themselves. Reproductions are not only partial instantiations of the artwork they reproduce, but are tokens of its reproducibility. How they function in respect of these qualities varies from case to case, and can change over time, for the most part by incremental growth. Furthermore, the matrix of an artwork that each of us can compile varies. This must be so if memories are among its constituents, for each of us has different memories, and the memories that each of us has lead each encounter with another constituent of the artwork matrix to be different and predictable only unreliably. Memory is the most volatile

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of the constituents of an artwork matrix. Memory, as well as reproduction and physical setting, provides the circumstances of encounter. Each time we view a work, the memories we bring to it differ. If memory brings its own individual and peculiar ingredients to an artwork, so too does the painting, the thing on which the painter focuses attention in making most of the many thousands of decisions necessary in the conception and construction of what will be an artwork. As such, we might think of it as retaining a position of privilege, if only because of the acts of making that it instantiates. Yet that privilege does not disqualify the claims on our attention of other constituents of the artwork. Even the fact that each and every painting is a hand-made, often multi-layered, physically complex, three-dimensional thing does not necessarily make it paramount within the matrix in relation to other constituents. Its hand-madeness and physical complexity-allowing, even demanding inspection from many angles, each of which discloses a different aspect of its formation-certainly predisposes me to lend it privilege. But that would be a conceptual error. However, it would be equally erroneous to regard it – the painting itself – as incidental, for much that comprises the matrix of the artwork depends on the peculiar characteristics of that painting. It is, in many ways, determining, even if few people ever see it and rely on reproductions alone. Reproductions, after all, must have something to reproduce. In championing the peculiarity – though not the singularity – of the painting within the context of the artwork matrix, I must admit to being at a disadvantage. Though astonished and impressed by all I have encountered in reproduction, I have seen but one painting by Luca Del Baldo. That one painting – horrible to disclose – is a portrait of myself. This portrait is as nested in a partly photographically defined matrix as any other of his works. It began with the creation of an image not by the painter, but by my son. An adult son can discover his father’s insecurities like no one else, and, when a talented photographer, can make them clearly visible. Such a photographic portrait was the source from which Del Baldo worked. I saw the progress of the painting in photographs he sent over the Internet. Yet nothing prepared me for the painting itself when I unpacked it. The laying on of paint is a temporally defined activity, taking many hours, often over many days, to pro-

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duce a thing of such complexity as I saw revealed. That is how painting used to be. Few now seem to have the patience – touch upon touch, layer upon layer, setting aside the canvas for paint to dry before proceeding – that characterizes much truly attentive work. My delight in painting includes practices of many kinds, but I particularly admire work that results from artisanal values handed down from crafts­person to craftsperson, trained unforgivingly in rigorous skills such as were found in the Netherlands in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This is a deeply suspect taste among many contemporary artists and critics – rightly so – yet its traces are what I value in this painting by Luca Del Baldo. It invites – compels, even – the eye to linger, to explore each articulation of space, flesh, and paint, as one alternates between grasping smears of paint and the image they constitute – the two-foldness of the painting (to use Richard Wollheim’s term) – a procedure available only to the viewer of the painting itself. Thanks to my son, I see no affability, no convenient contrivance on my part – no mask. Thanks to the painter, I see a painting, the culmination of selective, manual, and affective skill of a high degree. That painting is part of an artwork, which consists in a concatenation of photographic exposure, manual dexterity, concentrated thought, and reproduction, elaborated ever more by the workings of memory. This chain, this matrix, is Luca Del Baldo’s achievement as both painter and artist, and behind each of his paintings of the living or of the dead lies the insistent existence of a human person. That is what we confront. 2014

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Stephen Greenblatt

“ What are you reading?” Achilles asks Ulysses in Shakespeare’s scathingly ironic Troilus and Cressida. Hoping to draw Achilles out of the tent in which he is sulking, Ulysses replies that he is reading something by a strange fellow who argues that even the best endowed person “ Cannot make boast to have that which he hath” except by seeing himself reflected in the gaze of others. There is nothing strange about that argument, replies Achilles: The beauty that is borne here in the face The bearer knows not, but commends itself, Not going from itself, but eye to eye opposed, Salutes each other with each other’s form; For speculation turns not to itself Till it hath traveled and is mirrored there, Where it may see itself. This is not strange at all. (3.3.103-9) Like much of the verse in this fiendishly difficult play, the general drift is easy enough but the precise meaning needs to be teased out. It is perhaps something like this: since your eye – “ Not going from itself” – cannot leave your face in order to look back and appreciate the way you appear, you can only take in your own form by reflection in someone else’s eye, in which, even as you gaze into the face of another, you glimpse yourself mirrored.

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Something like this mutual mirroring seems to be occurring in Luca Del Baldo’s series of portraits. Each of us sees our face in and through Luca’s painterly reflection, and at the same time, particularly by seeing so many of these images together, we see Luca, or rather we see something about how he sees the world. For, of course, we do not see the artist “ eye to eye opposed.” Luca’s project is at one remove, by virtue of the photograph which we have chosen to send him. I for one – and perhaps there are others in our group as well – went to Google Images to reverse the “ speculation,” as Shakespeare terms it, and to look at Luca standing in his studio surrounded by some of his portraits. But, of course, I know that I am not looking at Luca; I am looking at a photograph taken by someone else, just as mine was taken by someone else, so now there are at least four of us involved in the exchange of impressions. If we add the other subjects and those who took their photographs and all those who will eventually look at Luca’s whole set of portraits, we find ourselves in a substantial group, a whole society. And that was Ulysses’ whole point: Achilles’ narcissistic interest in “ the beauty that is borne here in the face” can only be fulfilled if he emerges from his tent and plunges into mirroring reflections of the larger world. Though the sly Ulysses is careful not to say so, there is absolutely no reason to believe that in those reflections the subject’s narcissism will be gratified. (Troilus and Cressida in fact depicts Achilles as a spoiled, mean-spirited, murderous wretch.) Shakespeare mused upon the problem again and again – even perhaps, if we take the sonnets as authentically autobiographical, in his own life. “ Sin of self-love possesseth all mine eye,” he admits in sonnet 62; “ Methinks no face so gracious is as mine.” Then he looks into a mirror: But when my glass shows me myself indeed, Beated and chopped with tanned antiquity, Mine own self-love quite contrary I read. “ Tanned” here does not mean glowing with health from a vacation at the beach; it means turned leathery with time, stained, mottled. And this returns us to Luca Del Baldo’s portraits. One of the notable things about his technique is the way in which skin (and, in my case,

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beard too) is not smoothed into flattering harmony but rather formed from the surprising, often unexpected stippling of diverse colors. If I compel myself to turn away from my fantasy version of my face and actually look in a mirror, I find, to my mingled amusement and dismay, that Luca is closer than my mind’s eye is to the truth, the truth of time. About a decade ago a gifted Danish photographer, Torben Eskerod, took a series of haunting photographs of the photographs that are embedded in the gravestones of Campo Verano, Rome’s huge cemetery. Portrait photographs of the kind sometimes found in cemeteries seem to draw upon and reanimate the ancient Epicurean idea that the body emanates accurate images, images that, conveying exactly the way you appear, float off into the world. Fixed by an ingenious process, impressed onto metal plates, enameled and then inserted into the gravestones, the faces of the dead stare out at you, offering the irresistible illusion that they are giving you reality itself, or as close to reality as you are likely to get. Part of their interest and poignancy lies in the thought that these are the images that were chosen by the subjects themselves when they were still alive, or by their immediate loved ones just after they had died, as a way to capture forever – or for as long as forever lasts – the beauty, in Shakespeare’s phrase, “ that is borne here in the face.” But Eskerod’s photographs of the photographs capture something else: we see that the tombstone images have begun to crack, decay, and fade; many are scratched, spattered by dirt and rust, or speckled with dried flower petals; they are stained with the innumerable accidents of matter. And the effect is mysteriously, unexpectedly beautiful. It is as if time itself were trying to participate in the enterprise that Luca Del Baldo has so impressively brought to fruition with my face, with all of our faces. 2019

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Boris Groys An additional element

Why does one begin to speak, to write, to philosophy? The most plausible answer: To escape one’s own image, to avoid to be judged according to how one does look like, to transcend the design that is imposed on one by God or nature. Not accidentally the writers when they are asked about their identity, about who and what they are usually say: please, read my books. But that is precisely what contemporary mankind does not like to do. The contemporary media operate primarily by images – not by texts. We tend to identify the contemporary world with globalized media networks. Looking into these media networks is like looking into the mirror. One is identified there primarily by an image – a photograph or a video. Thus, one feels oneself as a never grown up Lacanian child discovering time and again its reflection in the mirror. Do we recognize ourselves in this reflection? We, actually, do not need to read Lacan to be able to say: no and yes. No – because we can compare our reflections in the mirror or in the media only with other similar reflections. We have no image of ourselves that would be unmediated – and thus the authentic act of self-recognition could never take place. But at the same time we have no other choice as to accept the image that the world reflect on us as our own – and to say, yes, unfortunately, that must be me.

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Here the painting enters the game. The painter – contrary to the camera – is supposed not only to see but also to “ understand” us and somehow to integrate this understanding into the painted portrait. This equation: painting is a photograph plus psychological interpretation of the model - is, of course, a relatively new phenomenon. One can find this equation in a relatively short article by Siegfried Kracauer from 1927 entitled »Die Photographie«. As an example, Kracauer takes a photograph of his grandmother, that is, a private photograph, a photograph of sentimental value, and observes that this photograph does not bring back memories of his grandmother as it should, but blocks them. His grandmother as a person, as an individual, as an inner being is not disclosed, but instead only her outward appearance is visible, which, however, through the fashion of the times - that is, through clothes and make-up - seems impersonal and de-individualized. Kracauer writes: »We are contained in - nothing and photography collects fragments around this nothing. When my grandmother stood in front of the lens, she was present for a second in the spatial continuum offering itself to the lens. Yet instead of my grandmother, this aspect is immortalized (...) not the person stands out in the photograph, but the sum of what is to be substracted from her. It destroys the person by portraying her, and if she were to coincide with it, she would not exist.« However, a painting can compensate this lack of personality that is reflected by photo­ graphy. The additional element that painting adds to a photograph is nothing else as the essence of the depicted person – added to its purely phenomenal appearance in the world. The painter adds the essence to the phenomenon because the essence of a person is its subjectivity, psychology, spirituality – and they cannot be photographed but only understood and interpreted through a personal contact that should be developed in time. Krakauer’s text explain that very well: The photograph fixes only a moment in a person’s life but the true image of this person is a synthetic one. It forms itself through time, it is a sum of memories, impressions, events that are accumulated in the imagination of the painter. It helps when a painter chose his or her grandmother as a model because here the personal interpretation is inescapable. But the same can be said about all the painted portraits. The body exists in space, the soul exists in time. The photographer produces an image in a moment. The painter creates an

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image through a prolonged work taking time. That means: photography reflects the body, painting reflects the soul. Now Luca Del Baldo demonstrates how this equation functions in our time with a perfect clarity. He takes a photograph – and makes a painting out of it. He takes a moment – and adds the time. He takes a pheno­ menon - and adds the essence. But how he does it if he is not acquainted with the person he makes the portrait of and, accordingly, has no personal memories that would connect him to this person? Now, Luca Del Baldo does obviously take seriously the traditional writer’s claim that the soul is to be found in writing – notwithstanding the currently fashionable discourse about the death of the author. Thus, he makes a personal interpretation of his model on the ground of his reading of this model’s writings. However, can a writer recognize himself or herself in such a portrait? But one is not one’ own grandmother. As I already said, one cannot recognize oneself at ll. One can only believe: that is me. And, well, one is always ready to believe. But there is another aspect in the Del Baldo’s work that transcends the question of recognition/non-recognition. Writing is a very time consuming work. Thus, a writer is always a bit annoyed by contemporary art that manages to escape this time-consuming, manual work by operating with photography and readymades. Contemporary art does not need the time-consuming working process– as writing still requires it. Today, the work of painting – especially, if the image is already there, already produced as a photograph – is a work of excess and generosity. So a writer is thankful to this generous gesture of an artist who rewards the same by the same – time by time, work by work. 2011

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Garry L. Hagberg The Self at One Remove

It was Oscar Wilde who, inverting what was expected in the second half of the sentence with a surprising negation, said, “It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.” But it is what he said next that is often forgotten and far more interesting: “The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible ...” In the musical recording studio world, rookies often quickly say, on hearing a playback, “That’s not what I played!” Of course, it is what they played, and very precisely so. But the conception of what one played is different from the actual sound one produced under the special psychological pressure of the illuminated red light that says “Recording.” In a way that is partly analogous, Gertrude Stein famously said to Picasso of his portrait of her, “That’s not how I look!”. His reply, equally famous, was “Don’t worry – you will.” Her conception of herself was different from how she looked, and so she judged Picasso’s painting not against the standard of her actual appearance and countenance but rather against her privately held mental conception. That, of course, was not Picasso’s model; she was. And in saying “Don’t worry, you will,” what he knew was that her mental image would change, at least partially, under the influence of his painting of her. But then there is more to it still: it is not just her outward look that is Picasso’s model, it is Picasso’s way of seeing her that informs or inflects his modeling of her outward appearance. And so his psychology,

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through the material intermediary of the painted portrait, is interacting causally with her mental contents. This case, as a microcosm, shows something deep about representational painting. Mimetic art captures not only the way the world looked, but also and far more interestingly, the way the world was seen. That psychologizes the matter, and it makes what we think of as the painting of the outer world at the same time the painting of the inner world. But then this way of describing the matter can quickly insinuate the traditional Cartesian conceptual model of the self: a hermetically sealed, metaphysically isolated consciousness that is only contingently embodied and situated in the material world. And so one might expect me to say that what I see in Luca Del Baldo’s sensitive portrait is a person I do not, and for metaphysical reasons cannot, know from the outside. And in turn, the next thought would be that it is a portrait of a person that I do know from the inside. But despite the lure of these phrases and their simplifying grand distinction, while looking at Del Baldo’s visually magnetic portraits in this volume I do not want to say either of these things. The distinction is too harsh, too neat, and too rigidly metaphysically categorized to capture the deeper truth that portraiture in general and Del Baldo’s work in particular is a kind of materialized philosophy. Against the Cartesian preconception, we are not hermetically sealed points of consciousness situated in what we will call an outward world. (Wittgenstein would observe here that we are pushed into “outward” by the semi-hidden linguistic forces of phraseology that includes “inward”). Rather, we are endlessly swimming through webs of relations that are constitutive of the self. In that sense, Heraclitus, as Nietzsche observed, was right: the flux does not stop. In the famous legal judgment that removed James Joyce’s Ulysses from the realm of banned books, Judge Woolsey wrote of the penumbra of relations, of associations, of mental connections, that we humans both find and make as we swim through them. Perception is not a simple matter – it is always more complex than we might initially think. Saying that Joyce had captured this aspect of perception better than any other writer, Woolsey claimed that the novel was a great contribution to literary culture and hardly the mere pornography that its critics thought it was. As Woolsey understood and as Joyce mimetically captured in literary form, the mind is not existent

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unto itself but rather it is no less than constituted by those relations, associations, and connections. Portraiture also lives in the space of such relations. And indeed, as painter, Del Baldo is not standing back, hermetically sealed off from that Heraclitean world. He indeed paints within that web of relations; he paints as a presence within them, as Picasso was present within a psycho-perceptual web with Stein. One can see in all of the portraits presented in this volume that Del Baldo is, however subtly, always there; brushstrokes are intentional actions, and intentional actions are manifestations of mind. But here again, there is more to it: intentional action can itself be easily mischaracterized in Cartesian or dualistic terms, whereby an action is conceptually pictured as an outward or embodied physical movement that is the materialized translation of a prior, metaphysically separable mental entity that we call an intention. On this model the meaning of the word “intention” is taken to be the mental event to which that word refers. That is not what intentional action is, and it is not what a painter of portraits is doing. Instead, the painter is working in the materials of the art in what we might call a dialogical way, interacting with emergent possibilities as opened by immediately prior strokes, and also by interrelations of color, form, and structure in light of emergent patterns that are themselves smaller-scale emergences within the frame of the work. Thus in this way too, the painter, within the microcosm of a work of art, is enacting the very kind of life, the negotiations of experience, the “swimming,” that the person being depicted is living. Heraclitus, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Sartre all saw this in their varying ways, and it is a truth that is demonstrated in the act of making portraits and captured there permanently in the finished work. In Aristotle’s Poetics, he categorizes the possibilities of the representations of persons: they may be depicted worse than they are, better than they are, and as they are. Aristotle is saying “as they are,” not “as they look.” There is philosophical significance compressed within this small difference of phraseology. In his Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle was concerned with the formation of character and the way that experience (the actions of a lifetime) weave together to shape a person and the trajectory of a life. Somehow—if mysteriously—portraits hold the capacity to intimate far more than the look. And to the extent that they

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convey Aristotle’s “as they are” and not merely “as they look,” they possess a kind of faithfulness, a human realism that reveals character. One can see the experiential depth of a person without knowing (yet) what that depth contains. One can sense the presence of humane imagination without (yet) knowing the content of that imagination. That is a matter of what we see in appearance, but it is not just what we see in what we call mere appearance. This, indeed, is Wilde’s “mystery of the world” as we see and sense it in “as they are” appearance. Aristotle’s teacher spoke of art as a mirror held up to reality, with a conception of mimesis that can be static, a representational glimpse of a moment, a kind of “snapshot.” But Aristotle speaks of mimesis as the representation of persons in action, in the flow of experience. This would seem impossible to do literally in portraiture, because unlike theater or film, painting is by definition static. But here is another large-scale distinction that can miss more than it captures. First, a portrait is of a person, and so the more we know about what the person has done, has written, has created, has devoted time and energy and thought to, the more we know about the kind of life lived. Adding the concept of seeing-in to our concept of seeing gives a fluidity and dynamism to visual perception. Second, the way a piece of music can change over time in its signi­ ficance for us is instructive for how we might understand both real facial expressions and their representation in portraiture. The originary facial expression, followed by its repeated recollection across time, can change, grow, and take on shifting connotations within moments of remembrance as they are situated into a life’s history. The experience is much like that of following the development and musical logic of a theme and variations. David Hume said that when we reread at fifty what we read at twenty, we read different things. Yet the texts of course have not themselves changed. And this is so with the expressive content of portraits: the paint does not move on the canvas, but never­ theless we “read” different things across the span of a perceptual life. This we might call action-within-stasis, and it, too, is part of Wilde’s mystery. Third, T. S. Eliot spoke of the temporal position of the poet. For him, the poet writes in the present but is simultaneously aware of both the past and its legacy and the future that the poetry was inaugurating. By con-

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trast, what is often (although not always) fascinating about a photograph is that it is one small fraction of a second taken out of the passage of time and frozen in place, allowing us to re-inhabit earlier moments as if in a time machine. With painting, like Eliot’s poetry, we seem to be placed as viewers in the subject’s past, present, and future, because the subject is not contained within that moment. Working from photographs, Del Baldo proceeds from that initial temporal slice but then expands its temporal frame. The photograph is compression; the painting is expansion. All three of these ways of thinking about portraiture move the conception of mimesis away from Plato’s represen­ tational stasis and toward Aristotle’s dynamism. One could argue, of course, that the possibility of conveying an expanded temporal frame within a painted portrait is impossible: unlike an actor on the Athenian stage, the paint does not move. But this argument, insisting on a degree of categorical clarity inappropriate to the case, oversimplifies. The sense of the expanded temporal reach that a portrait can convey is not a matter of direct, verifiable perception. Rather, it is like a crescent moon on a clear night: you know precisely the round line of the full moon, but most of that line is implied and strictly speaking invisible. Yet you know by the implication-content within what you do see, that what you cannot directly see is there, and so in a secondary sense, you do “see” it. Portraits can be like that, as can the facial expressions captured within them. My portrait? If I tell you that it is based on a photograph taken in a spontaneous moment by my spouse, you instantly know more of the web of associations in play. If I tell you that she is an art historian who wrote a book on the way that the experience of art and its representational content can create a sense of belonging, you know more detail of a better kind. If I add that the painting behind me is by our good friend the painter Laura Battle, you know more still. And if I tell you that the painting was a wedding present given to us at a lively party of friends that Laura hosted for us, you see more of a nuanced kind of the psychological environment, the meaning-constitutive relations, of that moment. If I tell you these details, they may seem too much a matter of personal association to be relevant to the content of this portrait. But then, are they, according to any fixed formula of exclusion? As Wittgenstein

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showed in his work on meaning in language and his remarks on aesthetics, the criteria that we use to draw the line concerning relevance will be circumstantially specific; there are not uniform criteria for interpretive relevance that are fixed in a case-transcending or case-insensitive way. Further, what of this: when Julia took that sudden snapshot with her phone, Del Baldo’s powerful painting of Wittgenstein was just behind her, so Luca’s psychology, through the intermediary of oil on canvas, was in the room and in my mind. And I was aware that this might be the shot that we would e-mail to him in a matter of minutes. But in the way that Woolsey wrote of Joyce’s perceptual penumbra that we all experience, I was wonderfully distracted from all the preceding by the witty remark my spouse was making as she lifted her phone camera, transporting me suddenly into a state of loving, amused reflection. This may be all private. But the point is that it is private in a public way. None of this content is private in the metaphysical sense of the term; like the line of the moon, it is the kind of content that is contained within what one senses but perhaps does not (yet) know. It is true that these private details can quickly and forcefully reawaken the Cartesian conceptual model of interior, mentally hermetic privacy. Seeing oneself in a portrait can at first glance do that, precisely because I know what was going on at the moment of that photo and its circumstantially enmeshed psychological content. But the claim of mental autonomy won’t survive reflection of the kind a portrait of oneself occasions; the painting itself combats it. There is such a thing as the phenomenological interior, and asymmetry between the first and second person cases, and again, there is such a thing as privacy. But as I mentioned above, it is not metaphysical privacy of the kind imagined by dualist conceptions of selfhood. The art of portraiture knows what Oscar Wilde understood: what we might initially call the unseen is in truth discernible in our faces, our expressions, our countenance, our gait, our responsiveness, our eyes, and the Heraclitean ever-shifting dynamics of our human, person-to-person interactions. The misleading schematic theory of metaphysical privacy would suggest that we are all, in the first instance, alone. We aren’t. As other philosophers have said, we are relationally constituted beings. Those webs and networks of relations, across decades, phases of life, and across vital actions, and the multi-layered interactions of moments make us who

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we are. But I bring this up again in closing this brief response in words to Del Baldo’s essay in paint because over the days of working on my portrait, Luca sent me photographs of his canvas at various stages of development. In viewing this series over some days, it came to me that his artistic process itself serves as an Aristotelian mimesis of the making of a self. Seeing oneself depicted is a distinctive kind of experience of art. The self is always involved in any aesthetic experience as perceiver, as interpreter, as sensibility brought into dialogue with a work of art. But in this case the self is the subject of the work to which one brings that interpretive sensibility. That special aesthetic circumstance opens an unusual space of reflection, and that is the gift Del Baldo gives his subjects. Throughout his remarkable series of portraits, Luca Del Baldo remains psychologically and transformatively present. Luca, in the profound sense of the term that Oscar Wilde fathomed, judges by appearances. 2020

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Garry L. Hagberg The Look of Wittgenstein: On a Portrait by Luca Del Baldo

In Philosophical Investigations, Sec. 78, Wittgenstein writes: Compare knowing and saying: how many metres high Mont Blanc is – how the word “game” is used – how a clarinet sounds. With three examples – and indeed only fragments of three examples, because we have to supply the background contextual content that gives these words their point within their conversational homes – we are instantly thrown into a world in which the relation between knowing a thing and being able to say that thing we know, to capture what we know in a proposition, is more complex than we might initially have imagined – a world where that relation may not be direct. Unearthing presupposition, Wittgenstein comments: Someone who is surprised that one can know something and not be able to say it is perhaps thinking of a case like the first. Certainly not one like the third. Certainly not one like the third. Knowing a thing, Wittgenstein is reminding us, is too easily pictured in terms of our knowledge of a determinate quantitative fact. And this promotes the unconsidered belief (or really a sort of pre-belief in the intuitive substrate) that if we know it, then we can say it. And if we cannot say it, then that means one of two things,

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one less interesting, one more interesting. The former is that, given the intuitions and model-cases or examples in place, we take this inability to say as the sign that we do not know. How many jellybeans are in that jar? It is impossible to know the number and not be able to say it. As a witness in a court of law, if we are asked how many men we saw breaking through the bank’s front door the night of the robbery, and we cannot answer or even choose between about two and about seven, the question arises whether we really saw – whether we know – anything at all about the break-in. But the second, more interesting thing, is this: given the undetected power on our thinking of what we can call the “Mont Blanc” model, we think that because we cannot say it succinctly, because we cannot propositionally encapsulate what we claim to know (and feel sure that we do know – we all know the sound of a clarinet), then we do not really know it, or we do not know it with both the completeness and the epistemic surety that we know the height of Mont Blanc. But this, if anything is, is to try to live on what Wittgenstein called a “one-sided diet of examples”. We need to add examples such as knowing the sound of a clarinet, and, as Luca Del Baldo’s powerful, gripping, and imaginatively absorbing portrait of Ludwig Wittgenstein shows, examples such as knowing the look of a person. And we need to reflect on what happens to our epistemic intuitions concerning the relations between knowing and saying once cases of this kind are placed centrally in our thinking about the ways in which we know things. But then what would it mean to place such cases centrally? Let us consider: in conversation about a book from which he drew a great deal and to which he repeatedly returned over many years – Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamozov, Wittgenstein said that there really have been such persons as Father Zossima. In the book, Zossima is a rare kind of person, but one of a kind we all, or many of us, have encountered along the way: one who seems to see directly into the depths, or into the soul, of person. The kind of a person who can look into you, see into you, or as we also say, look through you. Now: if we know of such a person, and are asked what is it about the person that conveys or indicates this distinctive and special moral capacity, we will likely repeat what has already been said, i.e. the person seems to see into one’s soul, etc. But it is of course precisely this that is being asked about and so

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this attempt at an answer in fact answers nothing. Or so we think – given a propositional-encapsulation picture of the relation between knowing and saying. Actually hitting this wall can itself constitute a kind of saying (if only partially by merely hinting or pointing) what we know, what we see – but in a way importantly different from seeing three robbers. Dostoevsky shows what Father Zossima is like, by showing the mode of engagement and the character of his interactions with others: we see this (a) in the way he speaks – the tone, the sensitivity, the focus on the minute particular before him while seeing this within an expansive and capacious frame of human sympathetic understanding, (b) the words he uses to help others give articulate voice to otherwise inchoate experience, and (c) the way he employs stories to simultaneously cast light and inculcate self-understanding. And so in answering how we know that an actual person is like this, we can say: “She’s like Father Zossima”. But then that requires that one first has seen in the literary character what one is asking about in the real person, so we still have not hit upon a description of a narrowly identified “Mont Blanc” fact that serves as the essential article of sayable knowledge. And we haven’t hit on one because, in short, there isn’t one. So to position such a case centrally in our thinking, we might then say not that such cases are by their verbally-indirect nature in the epistemic second rank, not really knowledge, but rather that it is precisely these that are the interesting cases, the cases worthy of more attention; the simple ones, by contrast, are just that – simple. In Philosophical Investigations, “Philosophy of Psychology – A Fragment” (formerly Part II), Sec 129, Wittgenstein (having just been discussing the duck-rabbit case) writes: The change of aspect. “But surely you’d say that the picture has changed altogether now!” But what is different: my impression? My attitude? – Can I say? I describe the change like a perception; just as if the object had changed before my eyes. Just as if – as if the object or drawing changed. But the interesting thing about what we know about what we have seen (on an ocular level) is: it hasn’t chan­ged. So in terms of pointing to or defining a determinate physically demarcated change in the thing I perceive, in terms of identifying the “Mont Blanc” feature: there isn’t one. And thus the point of

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his question: Can I say? There is no single independently-identifiable physical feature, and so there is no single propositionally encapsulating statement recording our perception of that feature that then serves as the expression of our knowledge, the direct saying of what we see and know. To see the special human depth of a person we describe as if he or she is Father Zossima is to perceive something irreducible and perceptually complex about what that person perceives; we, in our interaction with them, see something deep about what they see in their interactions with others. In “Philosophy of Psychology – A Fragment”, Sec. 137, Wittgenstein writes: ‘Seeing as…’ is not part of perception. And therefore it is like seeing, and again not like seeing. “Perception” as he is using the word here, means physiological perception; seeing-as is not reducible to that. Seeing-as is thus not like seeing (in that sense); yet it is what we quite readily describe in ocular terms, or indeed, as Wittgenstein said above, as a change in perception. If we see, in the look of a person, that special quality of (what we call) seeing into a soul that father Zossima exemplifies, we see in them their capacity to see into persons. Seeing into a soul is like seeing, and yet again not like seeing. In “Philosophy of Psychology – A Fragment”, sec. 143, Wittgenstein writes: “I meet someone whom I have not seen for years; I see him clearly, but fail to recognize him. Suddenly I recognize him, I see his former face in the altered one.” The line drawing, the duck-rabbit, has not changed – and yet the content of what we see, and what we say we see, has changed greatly. The face on the street before us was seen in full light, clearly and without obstruction, and yet we did not recognize our old friend – we did not see the younger face in the older one. And then suddenly we do. A wave of associations floods over and through what we see: our history with that person, what we did then or what we had together those many years ago, experiences that in part made us who we are – a thousand things can be awakened. And so Wittgenstein writes of this case: “I believe that I would portray him differently now if I could paint.”

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Portray him differently now if I could paint. Now that he sees the younger

face, the face he knew of years ago, in the older face before him now, he would – if the philosopher were a painter – paint him as he knows him to be, i.e. paint him as the owner of the face that, in a sense now discernible upon recognizing who this was and is, is in, or behind, the face he saw a moment ago prior to the recognition. This is indeed like seeing, but again not like seeing; it is the kind of case in which nothing physiologically has changed, nothing on an ocular level has changed, and yet, perceptually speaking, everything has. Luca Del Baldo has painted the face of the philosopher who just above imagined himself a painter (he actually was a musician, sculptor, and architect), the philosopher who just above gave us reminders of cases in which the relation between what we know and what we can say need not be direct, the philosopher who returned so often to The Brothers Karamozov and who claimed that there really were people like Father Zossima, the philosopher who said that it is as if the object before us has changed when we know it has not, the philosopher who uprooted unexamined presuppositions to change our way of seeing and thus caused new aspects to dawn. And the philosopher who – if the reports of many who knew him well, his biographers, and even persons who had brief encounters with him are correct – was himself a Father Zossima. Indeed, one can imagine – as I do – that his remark about people actually existing who are like that was in a slightly veiled or secondary sense a query to himself, an autobiographical speculation born of moral striving, about whether he himself might, at least sometimes, be one such individual. If there were a single, determinate, and isolated criterion for this human imaginative and intelligent capacity – if there were a Mont Blanc fact of the matter for Zossimas – we could just look, see, and then say. But for all the reasons we have considered above, matters in these waters are not so simple. It might take a painter’s eye and philosophical imagination conjoined to exacting technical skill to capture what is in play here. Looking to Del Baldo’s portrait, we can see at a glance that Wittgenstein seems to emerge from a complex background; true of the actual lived experienced of the man Ludwig Wittgenstein, it is mimetically true here as the face emerges from a complex network of strong brush-

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strokes. But there is more to say on this particular feature of this painting: Hundreds of these strong brushstrokes make not only an image of the man, but also an image of the thousand small experiences integrated into a coherent self. It is true that one could say this of any portrait, but any such over-general claim would miss more than it captures, because these are brushstrokes that we remain aware of in our seeing of the figure. And so as viewers we integrate them into a coherent whole, we re-enact in the viewing of the painting the process of integration. Lucien Freud and Frank Auerbach also do this; English eighteenth-century portraiture, like a great deal of portraiture, does not – it consumes and conceals the smaller stroke, so that the act of integration is not part of the viewer’s conscious perceptual experience. And with this in mind, we can see that the jacket, a herringbone weave, can itself function as a metaphor, an image, of the complex yet pattern-forming weaving, or sewing together, of all the elements of a life. Or to use the very terms set out by Wittgenstein above: we see that it is a woven fabric; we can see it as a metaphor for a life’s self-made coherence. But while that interpretive suggestion may perhaps seem fanciful (I’ll leave the discussion of the varying degrees of legitimacy of awakened metaphorical content as part of aesthetic perception for another day), content related to the collar is not. Norman Malcolm, in his memoir of Wittgenstein, mentions that he almost always appeared in open neck collar regardless of setting. In its day, and in its context, this was seen as a kind of quiet act of sustained defiance: like both the tone and content of his philosophical work, it undercuts conventional expectations, and it declares his independence from them. This is not solely a matter of meaning-inert style – we know that Wittgenstein said that the philosopher is not a member of any community of ideas, that he struggled to find, develop, and continually deepen his own authorial-philosophical voice, and that he said that if his ideas did not bear his distinct stamp he laid no further claim to them. We here need to use what Michael Baxandall called the period eye to look at that collar, and once we do we can now see it as what it was. But one of Wittgenstein’s famous remarks was: “The body is the best picture of the human soul.” And, if less often quoted, he also referred to the face as the soul of the body. When a person was recommended to Abraham Lincoln for a Cabinet position, Lincoln said simply: “I don’t

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like his face.” Upon hearing the recommender then say that this is obviously irrelevant and that the person is not responsible for his face, Lincoln replied: “Every man over forty is responsible for his face.” There is more than a grain of truth in this: we can see character in a face, and we can see both the inscription of experience and, as if a palimpsest, the loss of innocence beneath it. And so with this in mind, one imagines one sees – or one sees – in Del Baldo’s painting of Wittgenstein’s face the residual marks, the layered engravings, and the attendant sense of humane depth left behind by the unceasing labor of profound thinking and a life of complex human interaction. And here, particularly, the metaphorical content of the distinctively strong brushstrokes emerges in highest relief. But then – to go now to the most powerful aspect of this painting – what of Zossima? We have all heard since childhood: the eyes are the window to the soul (and later in life we probably learned the true depth of that saying). But we should also have been told: the eyes – some eyes, in any case – can powerfully and bracingly look out, into and to the bottom of another’s soul; the street can sometimes run two ways. This is precisely the sense that Del Baldo captures, and while many paintings throughout the history of art feature central figures looking out, or even returning our gaze, it is not common to see cases like this. The contemporary artist Marina Abramovic, in a 2010 installation at the Museum of Modern Art, installed herself at a chair, silently returning the gaze of each of many viewer-participants of the work who, next up in line, sat in a chair across from her, eyes locked for as long as they wanted. Her aim was to investigate artwork-audience relations, and viewers report all kinds of responses – breaking into tears, descending deep into the past, feeling liberated or exhilarated, becoming absorbed by the artist’s look, feeling challenged, sensing an impending destabilization of personhood, and so forth. She may be a Zossima, or she may be using the context to generate the appearance of a Zossima, or she may be challenging the very idea of a Zossima – I don’t know. But in any case, Abramovic’s is a case of eye-to-eye relations; it is that (I want to say, merely that – my doubt concerns her losing or collapsing the difference analogous to the difference between still-life painting and the things arranged on the table as still-life model prior to the painting). By contrast, Del Baldo’s Wittgenstein is a painted, technically masterful

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mimetic representation of a person’s presence, but then, beyond that and at the same time, it succeeds as representation in double-positioning the viewer into not only the one who looks at, but also the one who is looked at. He has captured in art the look of Wittgenstein, and he has reserved a place in front of the painting for those who want to occupy that “chair”, to experience an intimation of what it was to encounter and be confronted by that powerful and penetrating gaze. It is a painting in front of which one can feel too exposed, a painting from which one might avert one’s gaze in order to feel less seen-into. Wittgenstein writes, in “Philosophy of Psychology – a Fragment”, Sec. 147, The concept of a representation of what is seen, like that of a copy, is very elastic, and so together with it is the concept of what is seen. The two are intimately connected. (Which is not to say that they are alike.) The Abramovic installation gives us the concept of what is seen; the Del Baldo painting gives us the concept of a representation of what is seen. And they are intimately connected – but (like the still-life objects and the still-life painting) not alike, not the same. In addition to articulating that difference, however, Wittgenstein is underscoring the elasticity of the concept of a representation. With this in mind, let us look back for a moment. Wittgenstein called our attention to what we might too simply and too quickly think about the relation between knowing and saying. This, as I have suggested, is directly analogous to the way we might too simply and too quickly think about the relation between seeing and saying. We can think of real features of a painting, of what (to use that philosophically dangerous word) is really there, in terms of the direct perception of a visual fact and then saying it. But we need here to imagine a visual analogue to the sound of a clarinet. Do we not really know the aspects we see in the painting as drawn from Wittgenstein’s life? Such a question calls for displacing the “Mont Blanc” model and placing the indirect knowing-saying relations at the center. Dostoevsky shows what a person’s inner life is like, but in ways that are not propositionally reducible. So can a painting. When we learn, or recall to mind, more of the subject of the painting and then we look again, it is as if it has changed before our eyes. It is like seeing, and then again not like seeing.

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And for an artist who knows this content, that artist, in Wittgenstein’s words, now paints the subject differently. And so here a final point arises: like many of Del Baldo’s paintings, this one too is taken from, or perhaps better, derived from, a photograph. The differences between the two – the photograph and the painting after it – are differences that correspond to the distinction Wittgenstein made between the concept of what is seen and the concept of the representation of what is seen. The painter works in the latter realm; a camera is the instrument or recorder of the former. In working from photographs, Del Baldo is working in the space between these two concepts. And it is the space in which the relation between knowing and seeing becomes ever more complex, ever more – in Wittgenstein’s word – elastic. And if we insist, against these complexities interweaving what we know of and what we see in, that a given case of aesthetic perception – take the case of not only seeing Wittgenstein’s piercing gaze but feeling oneself, through the medium of representation, the fixed target of that gaze – that this must be either a case of real perception from what is there or irreal superimposition of mind onto matter, we might recall this: when once asked about whether a given case of perception should be described as the purely ocular on the one side or the cognitively projective on the other, he replied that he was not that hard up for categories. So in all these respects, we have before us not merely a painting of a philosopher, but indeed a philosophical painting, one that enlivens an intertwined set of the ideas of the philosopher represented. In this way it is what one might call – reminiscent of and parallel to Bernard Williams’ introduction of the notion of thick ethical description – thickly mimetic. Wittgenstein’s famous last words were: “Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life!” It was a life with its difficulties, no question. But it was also a life that constituted one of the greatest, deepest, and most devotedly sustained philosophical adventures in the history of human thought. Like seeing the younger face of our old friend in the person before us now, all of our background knowledge of this philosophical life leaps into play in our interaction with this deeply humane and imaginatively magnetic painting by Luca Del Baldo. 2016

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Donna Haraway

The tangled scales of embodied times are much on my mind these days. Last summer my husband Rusten, myself, and our dog Cayenne walked in the fossil beds at John Day National Monument in the Painted Hills of eastern Oregon, where 60 million years of mammalian evolution, in folded and gapped layer after layer, open up like rocky flowers on sere, denuded hillsides streaked in mineral reds and purples. Dog-family fossils and residues of flowering plants – and, in the more recent layers 10 million years ago or so, grasses – are especially rich and diverse in these Painted Hills. Cayenne, an aging athletic dog, newly diagnosed with early signs of heart disease; Donna, a 66-year-old woman scholar, this dog’s avid sports partner for more than 10 years, newly retired from her academic department; and Rusten, a loving agile man also in his 60s all slowed down to walk in three-part resonance with newly syncopated heart rhythms on a landscape of vanished tropical forests, savannahs, volcanic ash, and the organic beings recorded in slick, oily, rocky traces. To me, these traces suggested painted narrative portraits that seemed both expansive and compressed, full of living and full of dying, momentary and enduring all at once, frozen in rock and open to what was not yet in time, flesh, and space. I experience Luca Del Baldo’s oil painting of me in similar ways, but the portrait feels more lonely than the storied rocks and busy pathways in the Painted Hills. The layered and ongoing species assemblages are harder to discern, but they

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are there, in presences and absences. I am drawn by the woman in the painting; she seems thoughtful, and she meets my gaze in an invitation to think with each other, and maybe to walk with each other in entangled, biodiverse times of layered and gapped living and dying. The woman in that painting based on a photo taken in 2005 would have been with Cayenne in her office, writing essays that became a record of companionship called When Species Meet. Like all the bumptious world, Cayenne is just beyond the frame of the photo and painting. The reds, blues, grays, and blacks of Luca Del Baldo’s paint capture both the hot and subtle colors of the walk in the Painted Hills, where volcanic rocks, faulty hearts, vanished and present dogs, fossil gras­ses, that one July day’s wildflowers, and human spouses knotted together in the ontological cat’s cradle of ordinary “becoming with.” The portrait of one person, of me, in colored entangled temporal relays of digital media and paint, is an imprint of a fragment, a face, embedded in layers of pigment. Time both compresses and opens up in the face of such fragments. That painted woman is no more me than the fossil dogs of different families and genera are Cayenne or any contemporary dog. But we all – painted, sedimented, thinking, and walking – compose together the pigment-­ brushed traces in the hills of terran landscapes that are still at stake. 2011

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Michael Hardt

The danger of a project to paint the faces of philosophers is that too much gets stuck on them as individuals. In general I think too much is made of the proper names of philosophers, and focusing on their faces risks doubling that problem. Concepts get affixed to the names of philosophers as if they were their property. Philosophers know that treating thought and concepts as private property – or even as the creation of individuals – misrecognizes the real process of thought and of the generation of concepts. Thought take place not in us but between us and through, and concepts are generated collectively across time. Sometimes it seems that concepts develop the way stones move across a landscape. One person picks up the stone and throws it, then another person happens upon it and throws it again; and then another, and finally the stone has moved all the way over the hill. But really thinking is much more interactive than that. You are always thinking with thoughts and concepts of others, even when alone in your room. Despite recognizing this, though, philosophers often feel great pressure to take ownership of their thought and even to battle over which concept belongs to whom. I admire how strongly Claude Lévi-Strauss resists such pressure. He claims, in the introduction to “Myth and Meaning” that his work gets thought in him almost without his being aware. Each of us, he explains, is a kind of crossroads where thought happens. “I appear to myself as

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the place where something is going on,” he explains, “but there is no ‘I’, no ‘me’.” Lévi-Strauss tries to erase his face and cancel his proper name from the field of ideas, and in so doing undermine any effort to affix thought and concepts to him as an individual. You might object that such statements are the result of structuralism pushed to the limit, as if thought arose from structures not humans. But that’s not LéviStrauss’ point. He insists instead that humans generate thought but individuals do not. You have never had a thought alone, but only in the (virtual or actual) presence of others. My strategy in viewing Luca’s project is thus not to regard each portrait as a face attached to a proper name but to see in the portrait a crossroads, a place where thought happens, coming from and going to other places unknown. And this strategy is aided by the choral effect of the portraits together. I see this as not a great conversation of geniuses across time but more anonymous, de-individualizing process of the patterns and movement of thought. Viewing the portraits in this way helps bring them closer to the way thought happens. 2012

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Michael Ann Holly

When I was a little girl of six or so, I somehow had myself convinced that the reflection I caught in my grandparents’ darkened dining room windows on a winter’s night was not really me. So I adopted the strategy of a jester. If my grandmother, tucked away in her cozy kitchen, loved me so much that she arranged to have a shadowy stand-in prettier, more balletic, more sophisticated, freer than I felt myself to be, then I could try and winkle this substitute girl out of her glassy shell. I leaped, I pirouetted, I gestured, I giggled, I waved – all to avail. She was such a clever mimic that she kept up with me at every turn. The world was conspiring to trick me, not out of malice but affection. Did Luca Del Baldo, magician of mimesis, master of illusion, manage to catch me? The reticulated net just behind (before?) my image suggests that he did. And he has almost – but not quite – convinced me that this painting is really me. Why cannot I just yield into it? I might long ago have discarded its prototype – one of my institute’s “official” photographs – had not Luca requested a sample around the same time. I did not particularly like what the camera had recorded: the glance into the faraway, the wrinkles, the frown lines, the pursed lips, the guarded and suspicious expression. How did that leaping, laughing little girl grow so serious and old? “Could that really be me?” – as my beloved grandfather once remarked upon looking down at his own aged hands holding the evening newspaper. Much of my own countenance bears the scars of

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the singular tragedy of my life, the sudden death of my young son a quarter of a century ago. My favorite photograph, actually, is one that Alexander snapped of me a month before he died. I love that my innocent, genuine smile is the result of my looking at him looking back at me … When Luca asked if I might suggest some sort of meaningful background, I mentioned that I had recently given a lecture on Breughel’s “Hunters in the Snow,” a painted allegory of winter that I much admire, especially with its rendering of crows and hounds, two of my favorite beings. (I have recently even named my black pup, Crow). The ease with which Luca “copies” a complex sixteenth century landscape is something at which to marvel. And at least it takes much of the focus off me. Yet there is one dog at the left of the painting gone missing in Luca’s artful cropping. It is the one creature, an exhausted black dog, that possesses a piercingly direct gaze, an insouciant foregrounded creature that stares plaintively out of the missing corner as if to say, “Wait did you see me? Really see me?” Mysteries disappear right in front of the portraitist’s eyes, as well as my own. Where did the long ago dog go? How did my shadow girl vanish into the darkness of a winter’s night, leaving behind this semi-stranger? 2016

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Andreas Huyssen For Luca

As Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes have taught us, photographs are subliminally invested in the passing of time. The snapshot marks a moment in space, but upon reflection, it opens up its own temporal dimensions, though perhaps not to just any gaze at any time. This temporal dimension becomes even more pronounced in the case of painting based on photography. Especially when the paintings are portraits of aging academics. Photopainting, a kind of remediation in reverse, brings to mind the early paintings of Gerhard Richter, which powerfully conjure up a past, half remembered and half forgotten in Richter’s painterly blurring of figures represented. Luca’s painterly style, with its expressively layered brushstrokes, is very different, but his painting too opens up a temporal dimension. For me, his painterly transformation of the snapshot I sent him results in a memory image that now affects the way I see the original photograph. I have used this snapshot rather thoughtlessly several times in recent years on flyers and posters for lectures. So it has traveled, has appeared in multiple poster designs in the U.S. and abroad, all of them long since forgotten. It still has staying power on Google, among the bizarre algorithmically concocted and chaotic mix of portrait and group photos taken at public events, book and journal covers, and other only tangentially related images that one has no idea how or why they ended up together.

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It is now Luca’s painting, which I witnessed developing in stages via email, that brings back memories of the time and place where it was taken, during a lively discussion at a conference on memory politics in Girona years ago. I spoke about the uses and abuses of for­ getting, a topic that has gone academically viral across the world in recent decades and had special resonance in post-Franco Spain. Looking self-consciously at my likeness in the electronically transmitted photograph of the painting now, other related memories emerge: memories of strolls through the old Jewish quarter of Girona and of the days after the conference when my wife Nina Bernstein and I went to near-by Portbou where Walter Benjamin committed suicide when he was denied transit in his attempt to flee the Nazis. He was buried in an unmarked grave. Photography and death, it is a constellation that has accompanied this visual technology in practice and in theory since its beginnings when stills from the Paris morgue were a favorite subject. In Portbou we admired Dani Karavan’s Passages, his stunning memorial to Benjamin: the tunneled dark passageway down through the rocky shore toward the sea, which shimmered brightly in sunlight below, promising escape just as a thick pane of glass blocked the end of the downward stairs. The feeling of being trapped just as escape seemed possible was overwhelming. It triggered a mimetic desire to find the hotel in Portbou where Benjamin spent the last night of his life, and to trace Benjamin’s flight across the border from France into Spain. Taking advantage of today’s absence of internal European borders, we drove the short distance across the high foothills of the Pyrenees into France, past a now abandoned customs house. We parked the car near the top of the mountain, looking down from up high onto the train station of Cerbère on the French side of the border. We continued on foot up the stony barren hill direction Portbou until we could see the town and its cemetery on the bay, lying peacefully below us. As mimesis of Benjamin’s and his group of refugees ascent and crossing, it was certainly inadequate. Yet it did conjure up a time of closed borders and deadly entrapments, which resonate powerfully today: not flight from fascist Europe, but migration into a Europe of closing external borders. Think of the powerful entanglement of these two dimensions in Christian Petzold’s recent film Transit, based on the novel by Anna Seghers, a

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compatriot of Benjamin’s who did make it out of Vichy France and to exile in Mexico at the last minute. Looking at Luca’s painting brought these memories back to the surface in light of current events, and I’m grateful for having been pushed to put them into words. While never a complete reproduction of a past, memory offers a rich palimpsest that helps us live and experience extended frameworks of time and space. We have barely begun to understand how digital communications are challenging and transforming this inherent human ability. Luca’s portraits anchor the photographed self at a time when the accumulation of selfies and snapshots shared on Facebook or Instagram morphs into a collection of arbitrary moments as continual present. But then the paintings will again take photographic form, published in a book together with brief texts authored by the photos’ subjects: a unique project, which confirms Benjamin’s controversial notion that any photograph needs a caption to be made legible. Now I’m eager to see the painting itself. Or does that contradict the whole idea of an ‘original’ photograph transformated into a painting that has an afterlife as photograph? 2019

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Timothy Hyman Making Words About Paintings

As it turns out, I am commencing this brief text in a deserted central London, at one of the strangest moments in recent history. All over the Earth, a pandemic is raging, and for almost five weeks now the entire physical “Art World” of my city has ceased to exist. The great Museums, Galleries and libraries; the art schools and Universities; every exhibition space and auction house, bookshop and publishing house, every auditorium, church, restaurant, bar and cafe – all have been shut down. To give one example, the recently expanded Royal Academy (to which I was elected as a painter nine years ago) has had to close three very substantial exhibitions, five cafes and an art school, and will be losing at least one million pounds for each month of its nonexistence. Today, my 74th birthday, happens also to be the date when the UK’s first assault by Coronavirus is expected to peak, yet none of us know when any of these various components of our Life-in-Art will be allowed to reopen. We have all been made to step back. Perhaps in that forced detachment, it may seem natural that we not only self-isolate, but self-question, reconsidering our roles both in art and in society? Like many who have contributed to this book, I was baffled when Luca first contacted me. I dragged my feet. I told him of my “complication” – that although I was grateful for his response to my published writing, my primary activity remains as a painter; and, although I’ve often loved faces in cinema and the photograph, I’ve felt an almost ideological

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antipathy to painted portraits closely based on the lens. Yet as I read on, I recognised that several writers I admired had indeed tangled with his invitation in worthwhile essays. The photo Luca selected, was taken by my studio assistant and was used by Thames and Hudson for The World New Made: Figurative Painting in The Twentieth Century (2016) – that is, for a book that set out to refute the two very different art historical constructs that had oppressed me throughout my youth as a painter. In the map of 20th century art I first encountered (entering art school as a 17 year old in 1963) everything “led to” abstraction. The prevailing view was evolutionary, a kind of relayrace, in which Cézanne had passed the baton to Cubism, Cubism to Mondrian, Mondrian to New York Abstraction. In that formulation, any kind of figuration was not just marginal and “retrograde”, but a lost cause. A few years later a second exclusionary construct took shape: that painting per se was a medium doomed to wither, to be superceded by installation, video, performance and “conceptual” art of several kinds. Thus in order to continue at all as “figurative painters”, my generation needed to construct an alternative lineage – to recover a cast-list very different from that enshrined in either the Abstract or the Conceptual academies. My own personal canon would eventually include Beckmann and Modersohn-Becker, late Leger and early Balthus, Marsden Hartley and Alice Neel, Kitaj and Spencer, Salomon and Guston, Benode Behari Mukherjee and Bhupen Khakhar, Yeats and Darger, early Chagall and late Bonnard. … But I suppressed WRITING about any of those beloved painters, far into my twenties. I found the gear-change between painting and writing awkward and painful – I still do, every time. At 28 my first published essay was on Fellini’s Otto e Mezzo (in Sight and Sound) and only in my fifties did my first book, a Bonnard monograph, come out. I never considered myself an “Art Historian”. (Invited to preach my gospel as an occasional itinerant teacher, I never held a salaried, pensionable, post.) Five years later I was permitted to publish another book on a supposedly more specialist subject (Sienese Painting: the Art of a City-Republic); as with the Bonnard immersion, I believe writing “about” the art I loved most did move my painting forward. I learnt to see not only Art Historians, but the whole professionalised structure of salaried careers, cultural Institutions, and commerce that

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has quite recently formed around art, with a slightly jaundiced eye. One of my early mentors, Howard Hodgkin, liked to refer to painters as “Us D.P’s” and that figure of the Displaced Person still rings true. “Since Society abandoned the painter quite a long time ago”, Hodgkin would say “the only duty we now owe is to keep our lyrical sources intact.” Yet I believe most fellow-painters do share my hope for some more meaningful integration. Perhaps Luca might argue for portraiture as one such way. My own bias towards a modern “History Painting” always pointed me more towards the Mural; Leger thought deeply about painting’s lack of Function, and I cherish his conference address of 1933: “My architect friends, we should be able to get together about this wall. You want to forget that painters are brought into this world to destroy dead surfaces, to make them liveable, to spare us from overly-extreme architectural solutions … Out of pride, you haven’t wanted to call in the painter, who is waiting at the foot of the stairs ... he is waiting for your decisions“ It is unfortunate that our current senior architects would have learnt to equate modernity with abstraction, or with a “post-painting” mindset . Our dominant architectural language has very little space for imagery of any kind. Yet I believe wall and painting remain ideal partners, and my hope for a new generation in the post-pandemic world, is that we shall see a revival of mural-based commissioning. In our current crisis, painters are still painting (though I suspect only the most solipsistic will be functioning at full voltage); and writers on art remain productive, many of them still teaching by Zoom or similar online modes. A web-based “Artist Support Pledge” is under way; last week my studio assistant posted eleven of my drawings on Instagram and all were purchased within 24 hours, so that I have now carried out my “pledge” to purchase two works posted by other artists. Everyone assumes that our familiar market and art-as-commodity “system”, our art dealers and art fairs (in which so many art historians and art writers are complicit) will emerge severely stricken. Is this a moment when we can at least imagine a better system? 2020

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Fredric Jameson

one’s being-for-others is not always comfortable, but luca has given me a personality of which i am rather proud. 2019

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Martin Jay

According to the British philosopher Roger Scruton’s essay “Photo­ graphy and Representation,” painted portraits are “intentional” representations of the character of subjects revealed over time, while photographs are “causal” representations capturing only the subject’s fleeting appearance at the moment recorded by the camera. Although it may be possible to cite contrary examples – paintings by a Degas depicting glimpses of incidental evanescence or photographic portraits by an Avedon or a Struth skillfully revealing the souls of their subjects – the contrast is nonetheless suggestive, especially when the photo is a snapshot taken without any deliberate staging. But what can we make of an oil painting that is not based on a direct encounter with the figure being painted, but rather on a photograph of him? Can such a painting convey anything essential if the subject has never even met the painter, let alone sat for him? How are we to make sense of the remediation from one medium to another, from an image produced instantaneously through the magic of digital pixels to one wrought slowly by successive brushstrokes of paint? What are the implications of such a strange hybrid, in which the skill of the artist’s hand is employed to register what his eyes have seen only indirectly? What kind of “work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility” to borrow Benjamin’s famous phrase, can create an auratic original out of a mechanically enabled reproduction?

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No easy answers to these questions can be offered, but let me make a few tentative stabs on the basis of the painting Luca Del Baldo fashioned from a digital image taken for this purpose by a professional photographer, my daughter Rebecca Jay. Needless to say, his offer to do so is itself an enormous honor, and my inclusion in the company of so many other distinguished subjects – a number of whom turn out to be friends of long-standing – is deeply moving. But rather than focus on my personal response, I want to think more generally about the implications of the procedure, in particular as its potential is developed by Del Baldo. He is, of course, not its inventor; you can, in fact, go on line to find dozens of sites that offer to turn photos into oil paintings. But the results, if the samples they show are any indication, are cloyingly sentimental, hastily produced idealizations that look as if their airbrushed subjects were displays in a wax museum. In Del Baldo’s work, in contrast, fidelity to the sharpness of the photographic image, reproducing whatever unflattering imperfections may have been recorded, trumps whatever “intentional” enhancement a painting might offer. In hyper-realist style, he retains all the random details an unretouched photograph inevitably captures. The unruly hairs on the head, the trace of unshaven stubble on the chin and lower lip, the wrinkles radiating from the eyes all survive the transition from photograph to painting. Contingency triumphs over design. But in the transition, there is also something added that ironically bestows an aura of authenticity on what is, after all, a copy of a copy. For even without the sitter in front of the artist for an extended period, the process of painting in oil is painstakingly slow. Del Baldo, in fact, shared with me several iterations of the painting produced over a month of bringing it to its final state. The durational time Scruton notes as absent in the snapshot is somehow restored, congealed in the completed portrait, whose singularity replaces the infinite reproducibility of the photograph on which it is based. Or more precisely, to recall one of Benjamin’s many definitions of “aura,” it manifests “a strange weave of space and time, the unique appearance of a distance, however near it may be.” As a trace of a trace, it reverses what, as Roland Barthes famously noted, was the typically mortifying effect of the photograph. Such a revivification is produced, to cite another of Benjamin’s definitions of “aura,” by the investing of an object with the “ability to

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look back at us.” Or at least, it is hard not to perceive it as such, especially when we gaze into the masterfully rendered eyes, which somehow express the special bond between a father and his beloved daughter. Here causality and intentionality comingle to produce a work that defies reduction to an essentialized version of either painting or photograph. Oil and water may not mix, but oil and pixels apparently do. 2015

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David Joselit

What I sent as a digital file, my likeness, returned as a painting via Federal Express. The invitation to serve as a subject (which meant to be­come an object) dropped into my inbox out of the blue. Like all gifts, this one obliged me to reciprocate: to donate a text, this text, in exchange. A pri­ vate exchange of images, whose format would change in exchange, conducted through public channels both virtual and actual. Now this painting is my private property, but its author may still use its image (posting it, for instance, on-line). What kind of mirror is this, refracted through electronic and vehicular logistics, and an ancient artistic technology? Is it an obstruction in the circuits it traverses? It took a long time to paint. A grid is the infrastructure of transposition, still visible in the painting itself. My face is mapped across longitude and latitude – my forehead a globe, two ears different continents. This image no longer travels but it remains a map after all. A likeness of a likeness, a digital file arrested in paint, which calls forth another digital file, this text. Luca, please paint this text. 2019

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Martin Kemp

A carefully-taken photograph serves up a kind of certifiable accuracy as the optical trace of someone’s presence. A painted portrait has another kind of truth – the truth of an act of looking that is translated by the artist into paint that endows the subject with a felt presence beyond optical veracity. David Hockney said to me that “photography will never replace a painted portrait because it is not real enough”. By ‘real’ he meant the direct act of communication between the living persons of the artist, the sitter and the viewer. Luca’s portrait of me has that living sense, greeting visitors at the threshold of my study with disconcerting vitality. I am present even if absent. In the case of a painting made from a photograph of someone whom the painter has not seen, matters become complicated. The element of direct ‘realness’ is lost – or is it? In the obvious sense, Hockney’s ‘realness’ is unattainable. But the communicative directness of Luca’s painted image, as I pass it many times a day, seems to transcend the obvious limitation. It’s partly a formal sense that Luca’s sparkling paint application acts very differently on the eye and mind from the chemical or digital processes of a photograph. But that would seem to mean that the ‘realness’ is cosmetic or opportunistic. My strong sense that there are two dimensions that grant Luca’s enterprise a special validity. One is that he knows a good deal about us. We all leave some deposit of ourselves in what we put down on paper, even in the most analytically his-

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torical of our writings. (Latterly I have been increasingly interested in allow the personal dimension to be apparent.) The other is that even were he making the portrait in our presence, he would be intuiting what our fixed physiognomy (especially the eyes and mouths, so lauded by the Renaissance poets) says about our souls. There is a paradox here. Would I or my products be different if I had a big nose? Yet we persist at a human level to read faces. It is fundamental human instinct. The number of face pics on the internet and the obsession with selfies are just two recent expressions of that basic impulse. Reading character from faces may not be strong on logic and reliability, but it is compelling - which is the word I would use about Luca’s image of me without quite knowing how he did it. 2019

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Joseph Leo Koerner

Looking over my shoulder, my ten-year-old son saw the picture on my screen, laughed, and asked, “When, why, who, where … and what?” “I know what you mean,” I answered. “This portrait! When: just recently. Why: because he’s an artist making a series of portraits of people who write about the visual arts. Who: the artist is Luca Del Baldo, and, yes, that’s me. Where: I’m in Vienna and the painter lives in Italy. And what? It’s a detail from a still from my film.” My son’s “when” came first, because hanging in our home, for peculiar reasons, are many portraits of me, all painted in oil on canvas, and in a not dissimilar style to the portrait by Luca Del Baldo, with broken brushwork, and greens, blues, and purples supplementing flesh tones, but all of those other portraits of me are made when I was a child, looking eerily like my son, hence his – my son’s – bewilderment: not that there would be a portrait, but that it would be of me more or less as I am now, as his father, with his blue shirt and blazer, receding hairline, and sideburns dateable no earlier than 2014, when a barber in New York recommended them to me. And knowing that the “when” had to be recently, there followed the incredulous why, where, and what. Can any image be explained? Some art historians would like to think so. On the one hand, there’s the silent picture that draws us to it, makes us wordlessly attend to its engaging look: in my portrait, enjoyable to me whether or not it’s me, those hori­zontal black strokes with faint

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hints or traces of blue that render the right edge of my lapel and end, at the nape of my neck, in the blackest black; or the powder blue vertical strokes, of the color I would want for my eyes, controlled not, though, by the likeness, but by the grid that, granted full visibility in the painting, belongs to the final “and what” of my son’s inquiry. On the other hand, there’s the strange ambition to turn all those observations – mostly mute fascinations – into words, and then into interpretations. But my son insisted on the what, not the why: he knew I could explain, but wanted me simply to identify: what is this, this painting? But first, more precisely, where: Luca Del Baldo’s portrait shows me in Vienna, in the city center, in stride on the Jordangasse, between Rachel Whiteread’s holocaust memorial on the Judenplatz and the archives of “Austrian resistance” (as the Austrian government calls holocaust-related materials) housed in the Johann Fischer von Erlach’s spectacular Old City Hall. I was caught on camera in June 2014, within a film on Viennese homemaking; the film was still in pro­gress when the portrait was painted, and footage of my walk from the Judenplatz to the archives was shot as B-roll footage, to bridge interviews shot in interior spaces and to tie the film’s different parts together as episodes within one personal journey all transpiring in single day. Almost twenty-years before (in 1997), pursuing the fate of my father’s family in Vienna, I walked the same street to the archives, but not knowing what I’d find there, the documents attesting to my grand­parent’s deportation from Vienna on 9  June  1942 to the death camp Maly Trostinets. The cobblestoned Jordangasse winds its way from what was, until the pogrom of 1421, a flourishing Jewish community with a synagogue and school. On the Judenplatz today, a celebratory sandstone relief from the period still ornaments a building, offset by monument to Lessing, avatar of the German Enlightenment, the statue itself a replacement for an earlier effigy destroyed after Hitler’s annexation of Austria in 1938. Lavishly ornamented with noble coats-of-arms, caryatids, and atlantes, the buildings on both sides of the Jordangasse itself are unnoticed jewels of baroque Vienna. Walking past the camera, I tried to look at the décor as I passed, though I was conscious of being filmed, and probably was instead fingering the keys in my pocket so that, by distracting myself, I would appear candid on screen.

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My father was a professional painter who painted Vienna from life. Born in Vienna in 1915 and forced to emigrate in 1938 – he escaped in August 1938 aboard an Air France flight to Milan, then managed to get a visa to the US in 1939 – he had a moment of considerable fame in 1947–1949 when he showed his paintings – surrealist tableaux of wartorn Europe and the messiness of urban America – in New York and Berlin. After Abstract Expressionism took over the art scene in New York, he moved to Pittsburgh (partly because it looked like Vienna, with its rivers and bridges and multi-ethic neighborhoods) and painted and sold to local clients paintings in oil and watercolor of Vienna (his clientele often mistook scenes of that cities for views in the environs of Pittsburgh). My father’s favorite aspects of both cities (Vienna and Pitts­ burgh) were the hilly woods on their outskirts and their ornamented interior – in Vienna through it baroque buildings, in Pittsburgh through its steel mills. Although nobody would call him that, he thought of himself as a “baroque” pain­ter. When I made the film, I was paying homage to his walks through Vienna in pursuit of motifs for his pictures and of answers to the great question of survival, of being a survivor. The baroque Jordangasse, stretched between the Judengasse and the archives as between the po­groms of 1421 and 1941-3, fitted my purpose, so I planted the camera on one side of the street and let it catch me walking by on the other side, keeping so close to the plaster walls that my blue jacket got smudged with white. I sent Luca Del Baldo a still of that shoot because I liked that it showed me in that act of pursuit (whatever the film was about, it centered on my and my father’s obsessive belief that the secret lay hidden in the city and could only be revealed by walking and looking) and because I liked the profile view because it’s impersonal. What Luca Del Baldo then sent me, in stages, was something uncannily sharp (my left nostril, so intimate to me; the downturned left edge of my mouth, so disappointing, etc.), even as also everywhere shot through with the wonderful accidents of making (no matter how formalized the grid makes them, the brushstrokes retain a randomness that compels – or allows – us to complete the image). When my father painted me, as he often did, not as a portrait of his son, but as staffage in his scenes of Vienna (and Pittsburgh), he did so mostly in three-quarters and once from the rear, but never in profile.

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When? From the moment I was born: he painted me in my crib, surrounded by reproductions of Giotto’s frescoes in the Arena Chapel, which were pasted to my nursery walls. Why? Because he painted everything that looked interesting in everyday life, and I and my sister and mother were central to his everyday life. Who? Of course me, and him, and my sister and mother, and a host of other people who he asked to pose for him, in Pittsburgh and Vienna. Where? Indeed, in Pittsburgh and Vienna. But what? What caused this, what causes the painting? My father commenced his pursuit, undertaken through the medium of painting, when he learned, in 1946, what I discovered in 1997, in the archive toward which, in the film and in the portrait, I’m headed: that his parents were murdered. I commenced my pursuit, undertaken through the film explicitly, but as an art historian globally and impli­ citly, when, wandering through Vienna with him while he searched for baroque motifs to paint (e.g., the caryatids of the Jordangasse), I asked of him, but silently, my son’s range of questions. These are things I know. But they do not answer the “what” of my son’s question, as he realized instantaneously, from the fact that the painting was of me now, and therefore not by my father, that there must be a completely foreign desire – foreign to him, to me, to our family – underlying the picture. Luca Del Baldo paints portraits of art historians, I told him. The grid, I told him, may have helped the transfer of the photo to the painting, but we both agreed that it was much more than that. For me, who knows I was walking at breakneck speed on the Jordangasse, who saw myself walking in the film from which the still was taken, the grid belongs to the painter, exerting his control, allowing me to marvel at the exactitude that he had that my father (who never once worked from photographs) did not have, but also allowing me to marvel at things more familiar to me than that face that I know from barber’s mirrors (when they show you, with a mirror reflected in the mirror, the side and back of your head): how a tiny dot of reddish brown on the curve of my nose integrates the likeness into the background – that rusticated ground story of the building that I march past, those beautiful, terrifying plaster protrusions that read to me, in the painting and in life, as casts of the documents preserved in the archives of Austrian “resistance” and

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in Whiteread’s amazing monument, with its rows of books in inverted forms. Is every painting as overdetermined as this? Or is it the painter’s purpose that made it such: portraits of people whose business it is to state the when, why, who, where, and what? There’s a bit of green where my left collar meets the upper edge of my right color. It’s precise, like the grid, and it must have been only there then, as I marched through the Jordangasse at that specific time and place. As an art historian, I am amazed by, and I’m rendered speechless by, that one daub of paint there and then that took less than a second to make but a century to motivate. 2016

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Jerrold Levinson

Seeing myself recomposed in the time-honored medium of oil paint is a real thrill, no question about it. From a vanity point of view I also confess that I like looking, in this painterly interpretation of me, more rugged than I actually am: “The Philosopher as Lumberjack” might be a good subtitle for this tableau. And though I have not, so to speak, seen the painting “in the flesh”, it seems to me to have an incredible texture and solidity. In a word, monumental! One would hardly suspect its origins in a simple university identification photo. To have been offered this portrait by an excellent artist was already a stroke of good luck, wholly unexpected. What is more, if I had been asked to imagine a style of depiction for such a portrait that would be most to my taste, I believe I would have imagined something akin to the style with which Luca Del Baldo captures and transfigures his subjects. I now hazard a few general remarks on portraiture. First, what photographic portraits reveal differs from what painterly portraits reveal: in a nutshell, photographic portraits show what is on public view, however refracted, whereas painterly portraits show what may be hidden, yet immediately recognized as true. Second, a painterly portrait may reveal as much about its maker as it does about its subject; both are, though in different ways, plainly mirrored in it. Third, painting someone’s portrait may be a way of possessing them, if only metaphorically, and is akin to an act of love, at least in most cases.

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Returning to Luca’s suite of portraits of philosophers as a whole, I can’t forbear remarking on the irony of memorializing the outward faces of those whose careers are mainly given to inner reflection, of preserving the transient exteriors of those whose principal distinction is their involvement with the life of the mind. 2011

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Marco Livingstone I turned myself to face me

Luca Del Baldo and I came into contact with each other in that most modern of ways, via the internet and specifically on Instagram, where we both have accounts: Luca posting his art, I mainly posting art I admire by others. We have never met face to face, yet the process through which I became one of the subjects for his unusual project has been an intimate one involving the exchange of many messages and the mutual trust that is necessary for the production of any good portrait that will be revealing of the interaction between artist and sitter and of the character of both. Allow me to begin, as I will continue, with what might seem like an inappropriate digression into the private circumstances that surround this painting in my imagination. When Luca invited me on 16 July 2019 to take part in this series of portraits of thinkers – art historians, critics, philosophers and historians – each to be accompanied by a written response from the person portrayed, he could have had no idea that I had been diagnosed only two weeks earlier with a high-grade non-­ Hodgkin lymphoma, and that chemotherapy had started as recently as 9 July. I had yet to experience any of the unpleasant side-effects I had been warned about, so when on 17 July I took the photograph requested by him I was feeling well, looking no different from usual and in surprisingly good spirits as I had yet to feel knocked back by the cocktail of chemicals and medications. Yet, of course, having already gone through

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treatment for prostate cancer exactly ten years earlier I was more conscious than ever of my mortality at the age of 67, of the frailty of the body and of the necessity to face the reality that one’s time is limited and that important choices need to be made about how one is going to live the rest of one’s life. That Luca has by and large chosen older men (and a few women) as the subject of his attention for this extended series of paintings can be attributed in part to his interest in what each of us has written and published over many years. That background knowledge is somehow invested in his diligent and respectful depictions of our mostly ‘lived in’ faces, sometimes battered by life’s experiences but also, one hopes, imbued with a certain accumulated wisdom. As I write this essay in late October, having still told very few friends or acquaintances about the cancer, I have thankfully finished with my treatments but I will not know for another three months whether they were successful in eradicating the cancer. I feel confident that I might live as long as my mother and father, who died respectively at the ages of 86 and 94, but the portrait I now have before me will remain forever etched in my mind as a commemoration of that shock on learning of my illness and my determination to get through it. I am acutely aware of those thoughts being registered on my face at the moment that I took that simple selfie on my iPhone, knowing that it was to be translated into paint by an artist armed with great technical skill, sensitivity and intellectual curiosity. Scrutinising the painting now, it seems like a magical talisman, one that might protect me or at least ensure my survival as oil paint on canvas if not as flesh and blood. It is admittedly strange to ascribe such qualities to it, especially given that I was brought up without any religion by a Catholic-born mother and Jewish-born father who decided that no religious practices were to be part of our family life. I remain highly sceptical of organised religions because of the damage they have inflicted on societies and on individuals, but I respect other people’s decisions to follow a particular path and of course acknowledge the centrality of religion, especially Christianity, to the history of European painting. But I am straying from the topic of this particular interchange between Luca and me, though perhaps partly because at the back of my mind I am thinking of a portrait painted of me in 2016 by a Spanish artist friend, José María Cano, in the guise of Saint Bartholomew as part

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of a complete set representing the Apostles. (Cano, in his native country celebrated as the singer-songwriter of the hugely successful band Mecano, told me that he chose me as the candidate to represent this saint, whose martyrdom involved him being flayed alive, because he found me so unnaturally sensitive that I must have lived all my life ‘without skin’.) As an art historian specialising in contemporary art I still carry within me the methodologies of the traditional art history that I was taught at the University of Toronto and then at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. Yet over the years I have sought to free myself from the constraints of that discipline, from the carefully crafted illusion of objectivity and above all from the elaborate and evasive pretensions of academic jargon, which I have always found alien. So it is that in responding to Luca’s portrait of me I did not wish to analyse it via reference to art historical precedents, nor to place it in the context of the work of other artists, however knowledgeable and well-versed the artist himself evidently is in the art historical lineage of which his essentially realist portraits form a part. Instead I wanted to record the jolt of confronting an image of oneself painstakingly transcribed in paint from a source as prosaic as a selfie snapped quickly on a mobile phone. Within that trajectory a strange alchemy has occurred, and without meeting each other face to face I have the impression of being seriously analysed and laid bare in the complexities I have, as everyone does, as a human being: in my case reserved, questioning, slightly wary, tending to melancholia but with an optimistic frame of mind that accepts the vagaries of life with a robust fatalism. A few weeks after my 49th birthday in March 2001 I got the idea into my head that I wanted to teach myself to draw, partly to pull myself out of a period of low spirits. For years I had been irritated to be asked, when explaining my work as an art historian, if I also painted; surely literary or theatre critics were not expected also to be novelists or playwrights? Yet the creative urge and a curiosity to see if someone like me, with no innate ability, could teach himself through sheer persistence and trial and error, I decided to give it a go. Working initially from the imagination, six months later I began to draw people from life, initially as a way of sharpening my observational skills but also in the hope that it might help me overcome my lifelong difficulties in recognising human faces

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in real life: a known neurological condition known as prosopagnosia or face blindness. Visual memory for art (including painted portraits) had never been a problem, and I have always had good spatial skills, finding it easy to reconstruct the placement of paintings in exhibitions I had curated long after the shows were over. But the moving face was, and remains, a challenge for me. I am yet again breaking a cardinal rule of art history by bringing myself once more into the discussion, but it is relevant here because Luca and I share a passionate attachment to the depiction of human faces but proceed in diametrically opposed ways. I need to have the sitter in front of me but then work spontaneously and at speed, usually in a single sitting, responding as much to the atmosphere of the occasion and to the dynamic with the sitter as to that person’s physiological reality. Luca, by contrast, paints with time and great patience, layering the painted marks over many days or weeks until he arrives at a convincingly three-dimensional image; crucially, he works not from a person within his sight-lines, sharing his space, but from photographs, by necessity in the case of this series from photos provided by the sitters themselves. Luca’s method has many advantages when it comes to achieving a very convincing likeness, the subject of his portrait remaining conveniently absolutely still for the duration rather than changing position or slumping or changing facial expression, all of which happen frequently with sitters when they are painted from life. But photographs are not always a painter’s best friend. Lucian Freud told David Hockney that he could never work from photographs because they looked too flat and did not provide the degree of detailed information that he required. Hockney – who has frequently availed himself of camera-made images as ends in themselves, as a reference and as an aide-mémoire – came to the same conclusion with regard to portraiture, that he found working from life more satisfactory. Too slavish an attempt to mimic the look of a photographic source can result in some artists’ work in a flat and dead surface. Yet Luca’s portraits, the one of me included, have a liveliness – what is often referred to as a ‘speaking quality’ – and a fully three-dimensional aspect that are by no means easy to achieve through this process of gestation. By taking his time, layering his small brushstrokes with due consideration and judging the tonal variations and

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changes of hue with equal attention, he arrives at a painted embodiment of that person that one recognises as true, free of bombast, pretence and flattery. Exactly fifty years after I began studying art history, it delights me to acknowledge that the production of a successful work of art retains its mystery to me no matter how closely I might wish to dissect it pictorially. The big question that hangs over these portraits is how the artist has managed to produce so convincingly, in both pictorial and psychological terms, what he refers to as his ‘Doppelgängers’ without having once met most of us face in person. More than that, to reveal the person to himself, with the surprise occasioned by a sudden and unexpec­ted flash of self-knowledge that brings to mind words from one of David Bowie’s most affecting and self-revealing songs, ‘Changes’, from the 1971 album Hunky Dory: So I turned myself to face me But I’ve never caught a glimpse How the others must see the faker I’m much too fast to take that test 2018

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Sylvère Lotringer Behold suffering To behold suffering gives pleasure, but to cause another to suffer affords an even greater pleasure. Friedrich Nietzsche1

The theater of Cruelty, coined by Antonin Artaud, has become commonplace. This mean that it has lost the capacity to shock or repulse audiences who often expect to see mayhem on the stage. But Artaud, in his letters on Cruelty, was careful to give the term its greatest extension. Father Ubu is cruel, and so is Heliogabalus, and it doesn’t mean that they should torture or kill to deserve that name, let alone roll in sheet or splash blood on the stage, as I have often seen. Cruelty, for Artaud, doesn’t mean chaos or disorder, although it may encompass them. Literally, it involves “willfully causing pain to others.” But it is always cruelty for a purpose, and not just for itself. Nietzsche was the first one to turn cruelty into a concept in his Genealogy of Morals, but its purpose was to create a memory to a forgetful humanity. “There is no feast without cruelty, as man’s entire history attests.”2 But cruelty on the condition that people wouldn’t be ashamed of their cruelty life.3 Cruelty is often accompanied by festivities, because its purpose is to create a bond of blood. Behind the concept of cruelty looms the terrifying but compelling practice of sacrifice. The production of the sacred. The “theater” of cruelty is the collective creation of cruelty. But there are degrees of terror. Michel Foucault’s execution of regicide Damiens, in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, is an exercise in cruelty, whose function is to redeem the sovereign laws that had been endangered by the criminal act. Even an intention to kill is deemed sacrilege,

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and cruelty is necessary to cleanse the criminal’s mind. In Foucault’s horrific chapter, the most cruel punishment is not the degrees of torture imposed on the regicide’s body, but the fact that the criminal himself participates in it: “After these tearings with the pincers, Damiens, who cried out profusely, though without swearing, raised his head and looked at himself.4 The little theater of cruelty is a private drama added to the big one, like the little “Machine with a Child,” in Lindner’s painting, is piece and parcel of the big social machine. But there is nothing private about this little drama carved out of the regicide body, it is just a way of intensifying the pain. The two machines remain in sync. Cruelty is like a dance and what is cruel about it is the synchronicity of the gestures. Its inhumanity. The Balinese theater is performed by human robots and nothing in it can be improvised, everything is pre-determined. It is the becoming mechanical of the human body, the unflinching choreography of pain, the algebra of cruelty, which matter. Cruelty is excess without any possibility of return. Yet in “The Theater and the Plague,” a remission or a cure of a disease is always possible, but no one can tell in advance. The disease invades the entire organism, but it can also disappear without leaving any traces. And this brings me back to the theater. And to Felipe Monteiro’s “private” theater of cruelty, which is not the one that is manifested publicly. “Compared with the murderous’ fury which exhausts itself, that of the tragic actor remains enclosed within a perfect circle. The murderous’ fury has accomplished an act, discharged itself, and loses contact with the force that inspired it but can no longer sustain it. That of the actor has taken a form that negates itself to just the degree it frees itself and dissolves into universality.5 The superiority of the actor over the murdered is that he doesn’t have to commit the crime, only experience it to such an excess that it can infest his audience. Like Artaud reading the Plague at the Sorbonne, Artaud doesn’t read the text, but becomes it. His twisted body on the floor terrorizes the audience, who doesn’t know what to do with this excess. And then, Artaud got back on his feet dusted himself and told Anais Nin, “Let’s have a drink.” And then he added: “These people don’t know yet that they are dead.” The theater of cruelty is death experience of death while one still is alive. The theater of Felipe Monteiro is alive because it is alive in the face of death and disease. It is not something that he could put on his

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face, or on his body, like a mask, but it is one with his body. Its cruelty isn’t just an act, but an act of faith. In the park when he celebrates his cruelty, no one can leave the scene laughing at him, as some people did to Artaud who ended up performing in front of an empty amphitheater. Felipe Monteiro moved his stage on a public place and the scene is so competing that no one has the courage to leave. His body is the plague and everyone realizes on the spot that it isn’t an act, but for real. And yet it is more than real since it insinuates itself in people’s mind while, like the regicide, he look at himself performing publicly his private theater of cruelty, leaving his transient audience unable to decide if they have witnessed something too obscene to be seen, or the ultimate act of bravura, that of his own physical decay. Unlike Artaud’s actor, he can’t leave the scene of the crime behind, and nor can I. This text itself otherwise would never have been written. Luca Del Baldo doesn’t paint portraits, he paints death live. 2015

1  Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, Anchor Books, 1956, p. 199. 2  Ibid, p. 198. 3  Ibid, p. 199. 4  Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, Vintage, p. 5. 5  Antonin Artaud, The Theater and its Double, Grove Press, 1958, p. 25.

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Edward Lucie-Smith Portrayed

The celebrated Edwardian portraitist John Singer Sargent once said “A portrait is a painting with something wrong with the mouth.” Sargent, of course, made his career at the very end of the epoch when, in this genre of art, the client continued to be king. Now it tends to be the other way round. It is the artist who dominates. Today in Britain, if you are lucky enough to be selected as a subject by one of those painters – Lucian Freud, say, or Frank Auerbach – who still do portraits, yet retain their credibility as cutting-edge artists, – you are given no say in the result. Your appearance is merely a springboard for creative expression. Your attitude must therefore be one of humble gratitude for being immortalized, however much you may dislike the result. I have never been painted or drawn by either of these artists, but I have been drawn or painted by at least a dozen others, in some cases more than once. The fact that I have been selected so often as a model may have something to do with the fact that I write about art. Yet I have also been told, again more than once, and by artists who are very different from one another, that they find my appearance interesting. This cannot be taken entirely as a compliment. I am not, and have never been, regularly handsome, by the standards set by Hollywood films. Or,  indeed, it must be said, by any other standard I can think of. Nor am I particularly, memorably ugly.

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After much thought on the subject, I am beginning to suspect that what the random remarks of my various portraitists add up to –“It’s the tonality of your skin … It’s the way you look at people …” is something both flattering and not flattering. In my appearance they find a screen, on to which they can project something of themselves. Every image of me is an image of a different personality, in fact, of a different person. And all these personalities are fictions, over which I have no control. At this point I would like to quote, another, slightly less celebrated, remark by Sargent: “I don’t dig beneath the surface for things that don’t appear before my own eyes.” This omits the fact that the act of seeing is individual and unique. What appears before the eyes of one painter may be invisible to another. Essentially every portrait, of me, or of any other sitter, represents a coming together of a complex set of variables. As a created object, it imposes stability on a situation that is inherently unstable. 2011

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Thomas Macho My Face

My face is strange to me, a riddle I cannot solve. I look in the mirror, at least twice a day, I see a photo or a portrait of my face, and I meet a strange twin. What does he want to show me, what does he want to tell me? It was only about one hundred and thirty years ago that the age of photography began, the mass distribution of various techniques, apparatuses and machines for the serial reproduction of images. From 1880 onwards, the first printed photo­graphs appeared in newspapers; in 1888, the first photo camera, George East­man’s Kodak, came onto the market. Since then, people no longer had to go to a studio to have their portraits taken; they could now create their own pictures, even of their own face. Before the beginning of this age, portraits were as rare as functioning mirrors; and they hardly circulated in public – except for some ruler profiles on coins. Who could watch a picture of themselves before the Fin de Siècle? This privilege was shared only by artists and cultural elites. Today, however, our faces can appear almost everywhere: on identity cards, on home pages, on mobile phone displays. We are living in a new age of faces; but these faces are maybe fakes, no “selfie” seems to show a self. My face is strange to my mind, because I only know it from representations, never from my own perception. I can feel my nose, my eyes, my mouth or my ears, but never my face. In their famous critique of physio­ gnomy, Deleuze and Guattari emphasized that faces are generated by

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an abstract machine; faces are the result of a chain of complex operations that are today perfected with the advanced technologies of “face reading”. The face is the body of the signifier, a “white wall / black hole system. A broad face with white cheeks, a chalk face with eyes cut in for a black hole. Clown head, white clown, moon-white mime, angel of death”. And they conclude, “the face is a horror story”.1 But are Deleuze and Guattari right? We might as well reverse their observations: My face is strange to me, as is my self. Therefore, every look in the mirror, at a photograph or portrait allows an encounter with my own strangeness, a kind of psychoanalysis in the moment, a confrontation with myself as an unknown. The photo Luca del Baldo chose as the model for his portrait – after several failed attempts – is a simple “selfie”, taken on a car journey. I have had almost no experience with “selfies” so far. Usually I tend to make fun of “selfies”, as a lot of my colleagues are doing. Isn’t the world always more interesting than my own face? But then Annette, my wife, occasionally sent me a “selfie” during those rare weeks when we were separated; and I was very happy about that. I wanted to return the gift; by this way, the dry messages about everyday life in different cities were given the impression of a face-to-face communication. On the one hand, this distant encounter of faces is illusionary; on the other hand, it seems like an unconscious interaction, beyond all filters of language. You take three or four pictures, make a spontaneous choice to entrust a single photo to the software. You don’t ask why you are sending this image and not another; you don’t ask which message might be asso­ ciated with it. The quick procedure reminds me of sharing dreams; maybe therefore Annette sends me her few “selfies” usually after ­waking up in the morning. I never met Luca del Baldo personally; and I don’t know when he paints his portraits, in the morning or at night, drinking coffee or wine. In February 2004 – almost eighty years after the Leica camera went into series production – Facebook was launched as a social network in the Internet. Today around two and a half billion people visit the website at least once a month. Meanwhile the network has reached dimensions that make it extremely diffi­cult to maintain an overview. At the same time the huge number of profiles of dead users increases daily and already 2012 passed the thirty million mark. According to studies from

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Oxford University, by 2069, the dead could outnum­ber the living on the social network. Equally interesting is the question of how many Facebook users post a photograph of themselves to personalize their accounts. Increasingly frequently I notice strategies designed to avoid using a portrait of one’s own face. Use is made instead of historical ­portraits, masks, images of objects, caricatures, fingerprints, symbols, logos, buildings, town plans, landscapes and even faces deliberately concealed. Is Facebook in the process of being transformed not only into a network of the dead, but even in­to a Faceless Book?2 This develop­ment seems to follow a simple logic: As soon as faces offer no benefits of individualization, original forms of facelessness and political protest against surveillance and control become attractive. Back to my face: What do I see when I look at Luca del Baldo’s portrait of this strange face? At first I’m no longer able to see a “selfie”. The media-technical othering was transformed into an artistic othering. I can perceive that the per­son depicted is on the road, I don’t know in which car, with which driver, to which destination. I don’t know if she is leaving or arriving, but I suppose: lea­ving. Nevertheless I can imagine what this person seems to feel. She is not fol­lowing the landscapes passing by the car windows, but rather a series of inner images. She is going to another place. Associations with famous portraits of art history do not arise in my mind. The person does not look at me; she does not claim an exalted position. No mirror-stage, no face-to-face; she is simply on the move. My face is the face of a travelling stranger. And I remember a sentence from Gabriel Marcel’s Homo Viator I read some months ago: “Perhaps a stable order can only be established if man is acutely aware of his condition as a tra­veller”.3 2020

1  Gilles Deleuze/Félix Guattari: A Thousand Plateaus. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis/London: University of Min­nesota Press 1987. pp. 188 f. 2  See Thomas Macho: Faceless Book. Translated by Chris Marsh. In: Bogomir Doringer / Brigitte Felderer (Eds.): Faceless. Re-Inventing Privacy Through Subversive Media Strategies. Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter 2018. pp. 17–31. 3  Gabriel Marcel: Homo Viator. Introduction to a Metaphysic of Hope. Translated by Emma Craufurd. Chicago: Henry Reg­nery Company 1951. p. 153.

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Thomas McEvilley An Echo by the Canal

There’s an interaction between the portraitist and the subject, and one of the most important parts of it is the choice of the photographs which the subject sends to the portraitist. (Luca Del Baldo has never seen me in the flesh.) I thought perhaps he would produce a brilliant synthesis of these three images, three moments, three selves, three delusions. But no. Luca Del Baldo did not produce a brilliant synthesis of three images taken at different times and places. (And of different people?) Instead it seems he fell in love. He fell in love with one of the images of me and chose it and coseted it and painted it with a kind of happy devotion. From among the handful of photos I sent him Del Baldo selected one in particular of which his portrait of me is actually the portrait. I mean it is actually a portrait not of my body but of a photograph. The photograph represents the self in several ways – not least that it was chosen and sent by me deliberately to represent my self. So the portrait represents an actual moment (when the camera clicked). It was a sunny day. On the Accademia bridge in Venice. Jim Eliot (now deceased) had arranged a memorial gathering for the recent death of James Lee Byars. James had died in the Anglo-American hospital in Cairo several days before. I was there to see him off. Then the nightmare of getting out of Cairo in the blazing heat – all flights to Venice full – walking the broiling pavement – another day – all flights full –

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why was Venice such a destination at that moment? Surely going to the Venice Biennale had not become popular in Egypt? Finally I took a plane to Athens and from there a boat to Venice. Then the sun of Venice, a cooler clime, the crowds of art lovers. One person noticed that it wasn’t really the Biennale without Byars making his greeting to the boats from St. Marks Plaza. He lay in the sandy ground of Egypt now … So the moment when the camera clicked froze an echo of the moment of the artist’s death, an echo in the clinking of glasses by the canal … Manipulation leads back to that moment – or that other moment super­ imposed on it – or our desire and memory in our eyes – away with the voices in the air. 2010

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Ruth Garrett Millikan The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term Wilfrid Stellars

I do like this painting! It catches a moment in my life that is especially nice to preserve – in Maine, with all of my family, just off of the water, which is my element. Luca Del Baldo has put light and depth into the execution that perfectly complements the occasion and my mood. He paints of life with the same genius with which he paints of death. How a mortal can accomplishes such magic is, for me, a matter of mystery and a matter for deep awe! 2018

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W. J. T. Mitchell Portrait or Self-Portrait?

My first impression when I unwrapped Luca Del Baldo’s wonderful oil portrait of me was completely divided: the face was mine, but the ex­ pression felt unfamiliar. Every detail of the portrait seemed to me accurate. The Italian painter’s fine, careful touch had captured every blemish, every wrinkle and fold of aging skin, every stray wisp of thinning, graying, mussed-up hair. Even the two little dark spots on the left side of my forehead had been faithfully reproduced. Everything that too many years of sunshine had imprinted on my fair Irish complexion had been snared by the keen eye and hand of the painter. But what was strange or uncanny about the expression? It was an entirely faithful rendering of the photograph that I had sent to Luca Del Baldo. And that photograph was in a certain technical sense a self-portrait, or what the contemporary jargon refers to as a “Selfie.” That is, I had composed it carefully on the screen of my aptly named “iPhone.” When I was satisfied with my expression, I saved the picture and sent it off to Luca. My double take at the painting then, was registering a dissonance at the level of authorship. Was it a portrait? Or a self-portrait? Clearly it is both. The painting is a portrait, but the image reproduced from the photograph is a self-portrait. And that is precisely what is disturbing about it, for I read the expression (now rendered in gorgeous oils) as one of composure, complacency, confidence, and (in my darkest moments) a kind of smugness. It is, in other words, an expression of someone who has

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conquered his own doubts, and achieved a kind of triumphal assurance about life. Of course nothing could be further from the truth. The reality is that I am constantly beset by doubts, second thoughts, secret questions and private fears. Luca could not possibly know any of this. He based his generous offer to paint my portrait on my reputation as a writer and scholar. We have never met face to face. In a way, his picture is of a writer’s mask, a persona constructed carefully by the agonizing work of arranging words on a page until they seem to capture a truth, convey an insight, or tell a compelling story. It is thus uncannily appropriate that it is a painting based on a Selfie, of a composed self-image. It is not “painted from the life,” but from a carefully constructed façade. George Bernard Shaw says somewhere that “every man over forty is responsible for his own face.” But does this apply to portraits? Or to self-portraits? Luca Del Baldo’s beautiful painting is both. I will treasure it in some not very public place, where it will be my secret answer to the portrait of Dorian Gray. As I age into decrepitude, I will gaze at it to remind myself of how the magic of oil paint on canvas can sparkle with vitality, and how, for just a moment, I managed to project a calm air of clairvoyance. Or perhaps the more precise word would be acceptance, a resignation to the tragic death at age 38 of my son, Gabriel Mitchell, which occurred around the time this painting was commissioned. This seems to me visible in the eyes, which I recognize as my own. What does this picture want? Nothing, really. It has everything it needs, for as long as it lives. 2013

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Keith Moxey

What is it about my own portrait that both fascinates and eludes me? Unreserved pleasure, first of all, to recognize myself as the subject of a work of art, full of admiration for Luca for the skill with which it has been painted. Who could have predicted that I, like my ­great-grandfather the coal merchant, would also be painted from a photograph? Depicted in Cardiff, at the beginning of the twentieth-century his portrait today hangs in my Massachusetts study. Dating from the opening years of the twentieth-century and commissioned by a group of his “friends,” his portrait looks down at me from a distance thick with time. Wearing a three-piece suit and reclining in a chair draped with a leopard skin, Edwin Rabjohns Moxey, son of a cobbler, sits at a desk with an inkwell, a feather quill, and a disorderly pile of papers before him. A full beard and a robust physique complete his presentation as a wealthy and successful collier. Luca, by contrast, works with my close-up photograph smiling directly at the viewer. No suit, comfortable chair, desk, or official papers. The setting, however minimal, offers a clue to my own academic occupation. Behind me, there is a side table with an oriental carpet covered with various sixteenth-century scientific instruments. Art historians, if not a general audience, may recognize those objects from Holbein’s portrait of The Ambassadors in the National Gallery in London. The functions of these two portraits are very different. My grandfather’s acknowledges

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his social position; mine serves the purposes of Luca’s artistic project. Gathering images of art historians, aestheticians, and art theorists of our time, Luca has assembled a regular “rogue’s gallery” of intellectuals in exchange for their opinions on the subject of portraiture. Reading their inspired texts, I admit that I have nothing much to offer beyond some subjective impressions. If my photograph recorded a fleeting expression, one of myriads of ­others that have come and gone in the temporal kaleidoscope that constitutes my identity, how then has it been invested with such tangibility and permanence? Layers of paint suggest that the process was neither easy nor spontaneous. Flesh tones are interspersed with dabs of grey and blue that translate the effects of shadows, and a remarkable intuition allows blue to interact with the grey and white of “my” beard to give shape and form to my chin. At certain points it is even possible to make out the delicate lines of the squared drawing that enabled the photograph to be transferred to canvas. The painting is a palimpsest of times: the time of the distinctively twenty-first century artistic imagination that conceived of these portraits as a series, of the instantaneity of photographic “capture,” and of Luca’s sensitive and careful translation into paint. Carlo Rovelli writes: “Time then, is the form in which we beings, whose brains are made up essentially of memory and foresight, interact with the world: it is the source of our identity.”1 Far from fixing identity, these portraits never belong to only one temporal location. “Traps” for the eye, they will elicit responses in those with whom they come in contact not only in this moment but in those to come. A mosaic of varied and sundry times, these works have been endowed with the capacity to create times of their own: “A portrait is not only both object and representation. It exists during its creation, as perception, and in memory, in reproduction, in description and as text; in its own time, through time, and beyond time.”2 The “presence” of my ancestor’s portrait has the capacity to set my imagination spinning. From Cardiff to London, from whence my father emigrated, to Buenos Aires where I was born, my reflections are colored by its provocative visuality. More direct and talkative than a document, my portrait may prompt similar ruminations in my own descendants. More likely, however, once the familial moment has faded, and these paintings have finally been retired to attics (if not the dustbin of his-

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tory), is that both works will encourage reactions that have nothing to do with the lives of those represented. What attraction will they have for the future? Perhaps it is the very mystery they encase, their temporal materiality, their suggestion of a lost specificity, of a forgotten wrinkle in the passage of time. Enduring prompts drawing attention to the particularity of time’s experience as well as monuments to its implacable universality. Like barnacles on rocks at the seashore, these portraits will inspire and discard signification according the vagaries of time’s tide. 2018

1  Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time, trans. Simon Carnell and Erica Segre (New York: Riverhead Books, 2018), 189-190. 2  Sarah Wilson, “Rembrandt/Genet/Derrida,” Portraiture. Facing the Subject, ed. Joanna Woodall (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 203-216, 203.

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Jean-Luc Nancy Qui donc ?

Luca Del Baldo peint des portraits de personnages connus. Ce sont des artistes, des chanteurs, des écrivains ou philosophes, des hommes politiques – ceux-là de préférence morts, et de préférence morts assassinés ou exécutés. Il représente leurs visages, très rarement le reste du corps, et ne pratique que très rarement une mise en scène (double Kennedy par exemple) voire une mise en fantasme (Jean XXIII mort près d’un gorille). La modalité dominante est celle du portrait le plus classique et le plus « autonome » selon la terminologie des historiens de l’art : un visage pour luimême, pour la représentation de la personne. La représentation est ici médiatisée puisque les portraits sont peints d’après des photographies. Ce qui est représenté relève d’un choix préalable de la pose ou de l’instant, choix effectué par un photographe qui n’est pas nommé : nous sommes plutôt invités à discerner le recours à la photo qu’au photographe. Ces portraits donnent à penser tout de suite à l’image qu’ils reprennent, et de ce fait même à des séries d’images car les portraits photographiques portent ici le plus souvent la marque de leur caractère documentaire ou informatif. Ce sont bien ces photos qu’on demande pour illustrer un article ou un livre consacré à un auteur, un artiste, une personnalité. Le mot « personnalité » tel qu’on l’entend en français dans son sens social convient le mieux à la galerie de ces portraits. Les personnalités

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sont des gens connus, reconnus comme on dit encore en français. Ce qui d’eux est reconnu consiste dans le fait d’avoir produit une œuvre (littéraire, artistique, politique). On ne va au visage qu’à travers cette œuvre ou plutôt le visage ne vaut que comme signe ou signal de l’œuvre. C’est aussi le cas du nom : Francis Bacon est le nom d’une œuvre et d’un style ; Martin Heidegger le nom d’une pensée. Que sont « un style », « une pensée », « une œuvre » ? ce sont des singularités. Ce sont des distinctions. ll s’agit de « comment ça se présente ». Aucun n’est sans modèles antérieurs, ni sans maîtres, écoles, rencontres, etc. Mais chacun s’est fait à son tour modèle, maître, repère. Chacun pour cette raison a été « reconnu » et a reçu visite de reporters photographes afin que son visage soit enregistré dans un catalogue des singularités reconnues ; Double mouvement : les portraits sont des signes de reconnaissance des œuvres, les œuvres sont ce à quoi les portraits renvoient. Mais des uns aux autres il y a un hiatus : le portrait n’est pas l’œuvre. Le signe de la reconnaissance signale seulement que Untel est « reconnu » mais ne présente pas ce qui est reconnu (la peinture de Bacon, le texte de Heidegger). Serait-ce ce hiatus que peint Luca Del Baldo ? Il ne peint pas les personnes mais leurs photos, leurs signes, signalements, signaux. Il force donc à regarder cela même : la signifiance de ces visages portraiturés. Non pas « Francis Bacon » mais le signe/signal/signalement Bacon en matière d’art. La photo qui sert de modèle forme déjà un tel signal. Mais elle est en même temps la capture du visage réel dans une situation réelle. Les portraits que nous voyons ici montrent comment eux-mêmes – les portraits – se sont emparés de la photo pour leur propre usage. Ils ont taché, souligné, marqué, marbré, pétri, malaxé la pâte visuelle. Ils ont rendu les visages frémissants de touchers de pinceau, de passages et d’incrustations de pâtes, d’épaisseurs qui éloignent l’image de toute illusion qui la ferait prendre pour le reflet lisse d’une vision lumineuse. Très souvent aussi le portrait se trouve plongé dans une coloration dominante – un gris-bleu, un beige rosé, par exemple – qui le qualifie d’une tonalité, qui le passe au filtre d’une pensée. On ne veut pas voir ici, on ne veut pas reconnaître le déjà-vu : on veut au contraire demander quelle densité secrète recèle ce visage supposé connu. On procède à une espèce de dissection, à une autopsie qui se tient à la surface. « Autopsie » signifie inspection par soi-même. Tous ces por-

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traits invitent à une inspection, une observation, une interrogation : qui es-tu, toi ? non pas ton nom ni ton œuvre mais toi, toi-même (comme on dit). Quel même es-tu ? même que qui, que quoi ? même que cet assemblage de taches, même que ce mouchetage, cette bigarrure, cette mosaïque, cette constellation ? es-tu la forme de cette représentation ou bien la matière lourde et complexe dont elle est remplie, saturée, gonflée ? es-tu ce que ton nom signale ou bien ce que ces bigarrures murmurent et étouffent en même temps ? 2014

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Alexander Nemerov On My Portrait

Posing for my portrait suggests I’m a somebody. The word “somebody” sticks in my mind from Robert Frost’s poem “The Death of the Hired Man,” where the indigent hired man, on his last legs, returns to the farm where he has worked over the years, choosing that place to die rather than the home of his brother who lives only thirteen miles away. “Why didn’t he go there?” the farmer asks his wife, wondering why the hired man chose their farm instead of his brother’s place. “His brother’s rich,/ A somebody – director in the bank.” So if I am not to be a somebody, a big shot, I must pose in a way that forgets myself. Fortunately, this is not difficult, because for the photograph on which Luca Del Baldo based my portrait I make sure not to eat anything well beforehand. Not that this is a special day in my life – on most days I don’t eat lunch, precisely to keep me a little misty about what is going on around me, just a little more vivid and hallucinatory than I would be if I were satisfied and well-fed and looking round with a contented air. But on that day yes it is easy to slump into my pose and stare into space – to rest my paw-like hand on a book and my chin on my hand. The dog in the background appears to take a good long look at me. Initially Luca Del Baldo and I had agreed that he would paint me with a ­de­tail from Tintoretto’s Finding of the Body of St. Mark, a painting at the Brera in Milan that we both admire. Tintoretto’s vast perspectival halls – with

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their tracery of agitated vaults and columns – would make the perfect architecture for my thoughts. You might even say that in my work presently I am employing great legions of mental workers to construct such edifices as the proper sites of my scholarship. The bigger and more ­spiritually grandiose and more irresponsibly unbelievable, the better. Picture the British P.O.W.’s busily constructing the span in David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai, and you will have some idea of the forced labor to which I subject my thoughts, hoping that they will build something of sufficient and perverse grandeur. But Tintoretto’s spinneret architecture – spun not just from his dyes and silks but from the spiders who spin the threads the fabrics are made of – is presently beyond me. And anyway Luca tells me that the word “Tintoretto” on the spine of the splendid white book does not read clearly in the photograph I send him. So we move on to Goya’s dog. And I do not complain. The dog is stuck in its pit, looking up into the glow where God was. No one can rescue this animal there in the Quinta del Sordo, least of all the man who painted him. Even my presence does not affect his fundamental aloneness, which goes on unabated, as if the unexpected appearance of a human on the scene does not quell for a moment his endless yearning for the master he has lost, or who has lost him. I do not deserve the pedigree – the dog is of another breed than me – but yes he crumples my hand to the right degree and makes a good match for my despondency. It is all an act, some will say. A performance of the self, as the phrase goes. And I am sure it is. Part of my weariness on this day or any day stems from exhaustively arguing otherwise – that life is not all poses, that poses are sometimes even the moments when life in some indefinable way most appears. But, yes, you could say that I give up. The big shot cannot escape his pose, his pomp, and his very circumspection and modesty accord all too well with the standard lexicon of the “head shot,” the important soul, the thinker who finally cannot resist becoming another clown in the endless chain of celebrities and pseudo-celebrities and others who imagine that they are somebody. Only a person who keeps their nobody sacrosanct, who really does not need to try very hard to do so – who is only to be faulted for, in fact, not cultivating this nobody-ness enough – can escape a portrait unscathed. (And of course it also takes a painter who can recognize that this wayward

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element is the thing most to portray.) “Wayward” means drifting … a person who is always drifting … who cannot find a fixed point … who consents to rest and be painted not as a stopping point, not as part of a pantheon of accredited heroes and heroines, hard-set in their achievements, but in the hope that the constant flight of himself from himself will be what the image most portrays. He will then be like the head on an ancient coin of obscure mintage, the functionary of a distant part of empire, given a value and tossed on purpose or accidentally into the dust … or the mineshaft … and left there to be discovered, or not, as the currency of another time than his own. 2015

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Michel Onfray L’offense de la vérité

Un paquet venu d’Italie m’apporte deux portraits de philosophes : l’un de Nietzsche, l’autre … de moi. Cherchez l’intrus … Luca Del Baldo me fait un cadeau empoisonné ! Car il est inacceptable pour moi de me retrouver dans une galerie de philosophes parmi tant de noms prestigieux. J’ai du mal avec les images de moi. Je ne regarde jamais les films ou les télévisions dans lesquels je suis. Je n’aime pas mon image. Dès lors, mon jugement sur l’oeuvre ne saurait être objectif. Mais je dispose d’un autre critère de jugement : le portrait de Nietzsche. Je peux le regarder sereinement et le voir – le mien, je ne peux le regarder, ni le voir. L’expression « ne pas supporter, même en peinture » prend avec mon portrait ton son sens. Nietzsche m’aide à voir ce que je ne peux voir. Il n’y a aucune raison pour que le défaut dans une peinture ne soit pas dans la seconde peinture faite d’une même main. Dès lors, le défaut est dans mon oeil. Pas dans l’oeuvre. Si l’image du philosophe allemand me ravit dans sa vérité, la mienne le devrait aussi. Que vois-je dans Nietzsche ? Un cadrage d’abord, un art d’aller au vif. Le parti pris de cette distance ne pardonne pas – de quelles offenses, d’ailleurs, sinon celle de la vérité ? L’oeil, le nez, la bouche, les lèvres, les joues, les sourcils, les cheveux, la coiffure, ici une moustache, là une paire de lunettes, un fragment de vêtement, voilà autant d’occasions de dire mille choses sur un être. Le regard, la pupille, la couleur de l’iris, les

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cils, l’amande dessinée par les paupières ; les narines, les poils qui en sortent, les ailes du nez, la ligne de sa descente, le milieu de la figure ; l’artifice – la bacante qui cache la bouche, les lunettes qui barrent le visage ; les rides qui partent de la base du nez, celles qui creusent le front ; pour moi, les lèvres asymétriques, deux sourires en un, permanence d’un jeu entre pincement et volupté. Que reste-t-il de ces deux visages ? Un mot : « Halluciné » pour Nietzsche, mais peut-être parce que je connais la photo qui sert au portrait et que je sais qu’ elle a été faite à Weimar, une fois la folie installée dans l’âme du philosophe. Ce mot, c’est le regard peint qui le dit : creux, vide ou vidé, perdu dans une tache prune, violette, brune. Pour moi : si j’osais, « Ahuri » ! L’information étant donnée par le regard aussi : un oeil regarde le regardeur ; un autre au-delà du regardeur. Que dit le dictionnaire pour « ahuri » ? « Frappé de stupeur, surpris au point de paraître idiot ». Puis il donne ces synonymes : « abasourdi, abêti, abruti, baba, bête, confondu, déconcerté, dérouté, ébahi, ébouriffé, effaré, idiot, interdit, interloqué, médusé, pantois, stupéfait, stupéfié, troublé. » Peut-être faudrait-il aussi

ajouter : un fond de tristesse dans ce demi regard perdu. Je ne sais … Que dit la matière de la peinture ? Elle manifeste la vérité du matérialisme. Le réel s’y décompose en effet en atomes de couleur, en particules de lumière, donc en vibrations chromatiques. Ce sont ce que Lucrèce nomme des « simulacres », une cohorte d’atomes en procession du sujet au regardeur pénétré par l’œil. Ces grains d’énergie, cette force des taches rosées, ce sont les danses de ce qui fait le monde. Ici : un fragment du monde dans deux visages. Deux visages qui sont deux mondes. Finalement, ce que je ne vois pas dans mon portrait, c’est ce qu’il faut voir et qui s’y trouve vraiment. Voilà pourquoi, au pied de ma bibliothèque où j’avais posé les deux oeuvres, celle de Nietzsche à l’air libre, la mienne, tournée vers le mur, un ami a retourné le tableau qui me représente et s’est esclaffé : « Ah ! Dis donc, c’est vraiment toi … ». Puisqu’il me le disait et que Luca l’avait si bien dit, c’était donc vrai. Raison de plus pour accrocher celui de Nietzsche dans ma bibliothèque – et tenir le mien loin du regard du philosophe allemand … Peut être dans un placard ! 2013

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Marjorie Perloff

My first reaction to Luca Del Baldo’s portrait of me was one of disappointment: wasn’t it just another version of the photograph I had sent him? A less attractive version in which every pimple or red spot on my face or neck showed up, and where my teeth looked more discolored than I think of them as being. Then, too, I am not keen on realistic paint­ ing: my own predilection for the avant-garde means that I favor abstract portraits like Gertrude Stein’s “Picasso” and “Matisse,” or parodic ones like Duchamp’s “Rrose Sélavy.” For verisimilitude, I prefer photographs to painted portraits – those wonderful images of John Cage and Merce Cunningham, for instance, or the many photographs of Frank O’Hara, which I much prefer to Larry Rivers’s fanciful painting of a nude Frank or Alex Katz’s stylized painted profile. And yet. … Here is Luca Del Baldo’s portrait staring at me and making me just a bit uncomfortable by its presence. Unlike the photograph on which it is based – a nice shot made by the New York photograph Lawrence Schwarzwald – the painting demands my attention in odd ways. Despite the profusion of unflattering detail – a neck reminiscent of chicken gizzards, for instance, as well as unruly spiky hair – the face that looks at me, etched against a bright blue background, is an optimistic and energetic one. This woman, I tell myself, can get things done. She is confident and relaxed; she is smiling. One wouldn’t guess that the portrait’s subject is in her eighties. The

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portrait has a jaunty, upbeat air, and I like that quality. The silver necklace reflects what seems to be a blue sky. The hair is tousled and natural. The painter couldn’t have known it, but his portrait of me makes me think of my favorite Wittgenstein quote, “The world of the happy is a happy world.” 2019

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Mario Perniola La Metapittura di Luca Del Baldo

Noi conosciamo la storia dell’arte in massima parte attraverso le fotografie. André Malraux aveva colto l’enorme importanza della riproduzione fotografica che permette di accedere ad un museo immaginario, comprendente le opere d’arte di tutto il mondo. Luca Del Baldo rovescia l’approccio di Malraux: con lui non si procede dall’opera d’arte alla fotografia, ma all’inverso dalla seconda alla prima. C’è qualcosa di paradossale e di perturbante nel suo programma, perché il quadro è a sua volta fotografato e perfino messo in internet. Quest’operazione apre due problematiche: la prima riguarda il confronto tra le due immagini. Qual è l’originale? Si può dire che una fotografia sia “originale”, se la sua essenza è – come ha spiegato Walter Benjamin – la possibilità di una riproducibilità tecnica illimitata? Certo no. L’originale è solo la visione oculare del fotografo nel momento in cui ha scattato la foto. Essa sta nel suo occhio in quel preciso momento: può la tecnologia fornirci questo “originale”? Il secondo aspetto inquietante del progetto di Del Baldo è il procedimento di mise en abîme che esso scatena. Infatti, la sequenza fotografia-quadro-fotografia è virtualmente inarrestabile: essa può ripetersi all’infinito, dando luogo a una serie di copie delle copie ognuna delle quali è differente dalla precedente. Le due nozioni di ripetizione e differenza si rivelano perciò connesse tra loro. Il rapporto che si stabilisce tra le immagini è pensabile attraverso la nozione di transito, come

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p­ assaggio dallo stesso allo stesso. Il carattere perverso di tale processo è chiaramente espresso nella prefazione alla terza edizione del mio libro Transiti. Filosofia e perversione (Roma, Castelvecchi editore). Tutto in fondo si riconduce a ciò che Hegel chiamava il cattivo infinito (das Schlecht-Unendliche): un processo che non si arresta mai e nel quale la contraddizione non è mai sciolta in un’affermazione. Esiste dunque un’affinità profonda tra l’operazione di Del Baldo e il mio lavoro filosofico nel quale hanno giocato un ruolo essenziale due concetti: la negazione dell’originale, implicita nell’idea di simulacro (vedi La società dei simulacri, Mimesis 2011) e in quella di mise en abîme che costituì l’argomento del mio primo libro (Il metaromanzo, 1966). 2014

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Steven Pinker

A portrait based on a photograph raises questions that fascinate me as an amateur photographer and student of visual perception. What is physical differences allow us to look at two representations, both “realistic,” and judge one to be photographic and the other artistic? This is becoming a serious issue in digital photography, which not only offers photographers the ability to convert a photo into a painterly representation with a keystroke if they explicitly choose to do so, but more and more is offering manipulations that cause a photograph to begin to look like a painting in subtle and unintended ways – techniques like high-dynamic-range software that combines multiple exposures into a single image, tone mapping, and context-sensitive shadow and highlight manipulations. The resulting “painterly” images are often considered unrealistic and inferior as photographs – though other kinds of manipu­ lation may yield representations that differ just as much from the original image, yet are perceived as still “photographic.” What is the difference, and should we welcome the birth of a new genre that is neither a photograph nor a drawing? Also, why do we sometimes find paintings and drawings more aesthetically pleasing and emotionally evocative than a corresponding photograph? Part of the answer may be that artists (and digital image manipulation engineers) have implicitly discovered what the visual brain “wants” – which properties of a visual image deliver the most informative and analyzable understanding of the world, some-

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times one that is more ideal than the real world could ever deliver. This may include hyper-real levels of contrast, color, and sharpness, and, in addition, high levels of local and fine-scale contrast (making edges and surfaces easy to perceive) with low global and coarse-scale contrast (making the image as a whole harmonious and balanced). But push this too far and some other part of visual memory registers the fact that the image qualities are far outside the envelope of possible experience. And the artist, of course, adds visual touches that have an aesthetic and even an editorial intent – visual originality, moods of brightness and clarity or their opposites, perceptions of health and robustness and energy, a sense of invitation or foreboding or desire or repulsion. 2012

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Joachim Pissarro Luca Del Baldo’s Project: Art about Art Historians

Luca Del Baldo is a painter. He paints portraits. He paints portraits of particular models: of people who write about art – art historians/theoreticians. Thus, LdB creates art about those who write about art. Nothing very complex about this opening statement, but as soon as one opens up the chain of logical conditions and implications that are inherent in this project, which from now on, we will refer to as (P), we enter into a far more complex set of propositions than one would expect. Indeed, one soon enters into an interesting, intriguing and somewhat complicated logical sequence by which: Luca Del Baldo, painter, (x) creates images (portraits) of individuals (a, b, c, …) whose job consists in writing about images. The artist paints (produces a visual image) of individuals whose job is to produce discourse out of the visual. X visualizes and projects visual images of those (a, b, c, …) who interpret the visual. Through this project, x activates an interesting dialectical whirlpool between the visual and the discursive. It is interesting to ponder a while upon the few logical functions at stake here, which, linked together, define the extent of Project (P). For the sake of brevity and clarity, it is useful to resort to the vocabulary of propositional logic: F1: x (the artist) creates a work of art; the result of this function is w = the work of art = a portrait of a, b, c, d …;

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F2: a, b, c, d, … writes about art (active function); F3: a, b, c, d, … has been selected (passive function) by x to be the model of a portrait by x. F1 and F3 are symmetric functions: F1 → F3 and reciprocally F3 → F1, therefore, F1 ↔ F3 But F2 and F3 are not symmetric: F3 → F2; but, F2 → (negative implication) F3 In F1, x acts upon a, b, c and in F2, a, b, c are acted upon. F1 is an active function; F3 is its mirroring, passive equivalent. Furthermore, F3 is a not only a passive action, it is also gratifying, in more ways than one, insofar as a, b, c … (x 70) have all been the beneficiaries of the generosity of x, the artist, who gifted each of the portraits to each of his models – but this gratification is difficult to quantify through logical propositional symbols. We will return to this at the end of this brief summary. So far, again, nothing terribly unusual about this situation, except perhaps for the expansive nature of the project itself – in quantitative terms alone, this project (70+ portraits) calls for special attention. But what nicely complicates this set of logical propositions is the introduction of the second function (F2) : All of the agents of F3 are art historians/theoreticians. This gives P (the Project) its unique tenor. This logical concatenation becomes all the more interesting, and intri­ guing, as one tackles to define the kind of functional operative that links all three functions: F1, F2 and F3. What makes this project uniquely original is that F2 is the condition for F3 to happen. In order to belong to F3 (to have been selected as a model of a portrait by x, in this project (P)), one has to belong to F2 (to have written about art); but the reciprocal proposition is not necessarily true: Not all elements of F2 (all art writers) belong to F3 (having had a portrait done by LdB). We can put this non-symmetric relation through universal and existential quantifiers in the following manner: Proposition 1: a ∈ F3 → a ∈ F2, P (a): for all a in the set F3, a also belongs in the set F2, the statement P (a) is true (a belongs in Project (P)).

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But, Proposition 2: Eb ∈ F2, and b ∉ F3, non-P (b): there exists a b belonging to F2 (art writer) who does not belong to F3 (has not had a portrait done by x), and for whom the Proposition P(b) (b is part of P) is not true. Proposition 2: To this latter proposition belong throngs of art historians/writers who are not featured in LdB’s Project. To return to the formulation used above: LdB paints portraits of particular models: people who write about art (F1); But, (obviously) not all people who write about art have been portrayed by LdB (F2 → (negative implication) F3). The differential between F1 and F2 introduces another very interesting question: what have been the criteria for selecting those elements of F2 (art writers) who became elements of F3 (models of a portrait by LdB), with the understanding, of course, that the inversion of F2 (i.e, all people who write about art have been portrayed by LdB) is de facto impossible. Notwithstanding this actual impossibility, the question of criteria remains interesting: how did LdB chose his subjects, among the vast pool of possibilities offered by F2? Here, of course, only LdB himself can answer this question, but for now, we can establish a new function: F4 (= x reads art history) to which LdB clearly belongs: Ex ∈ F4, P(x), knowing that P = RAH (reading art history) And, furthermore, Ex ∈ F4 + F1, P(x), knowing that P here = a double attribute: (RAH + Painting a portrait of Art Historian, a, b, c,). And here, we can deduce that x (= Luca Del Baldo) is likely unique in combining these two functions. In fact, we can allege with quasi-certainty that F4 (LdB reads art history/ theory) is a logical condition of P (the whole project): therefore, F4 → P (F4/LdB reading art history is a condition of possibility for P to exist). One may also assume that LdB enjoys, at least in part, reading art history/theory. We now find ourselves in a new situation by which, one can say that LdB reads us (elements of F2) before selecting us as subjects for a portrait (elements of F3). So, we can now further elaborate our next sequence of logic implications:

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F2 (a, b, c, d … write about art) → F4 (x/artist reads what a, b, c, d write about art); The proposition {F2 → F4} becomes a condition for F3, itself a condition for F1. So, we get: P = {F2 → F4} → F3 → F1, by which reading – writing – gazing – become factors in a string of functions that mutually condition and lead one to another: x reads what a, b, c have written; a, b, c are selected (F3) for a portrait (F1) that will in effect produce an artistic image of those who write about art, as read by x (author of the portraits of a, b, c …) Of course, this chain of logical propositions is not neutral nor simple: by producing a visual portrait of those who write, and whom x read, x actually proposes a visual image that could itself be read – almost in a psychoanalytical sense. Actually, one of the ‘subjects’ in this project has convincingly compared the Project to the commission that Géricault received to paint patients, residents of psychiatric institutions. According to this provocative though interesting analogy, the question of the criteria for F3 (who, among art writers, was selected to be part of P) would receive the following answer: in order for a, b, c, … (art writers) to be selected (F3) for be part of P, a, b, and c … have to be somehow victims of the folly of art history/theory … In order to complete this functional cycle, now beginning to get somewhat complex, we need to add a fifth and final function (F5). x paints our portraits (F1) – and generously gifts us with this portrait! – but there is a price to it. We are the passive recipients of F1, and of the part of the product of P, by receiving this portrait, this image of ourselves, writers … But the price to this ‘exchange’ is that we are asked by x to return to our métiers as writers, and do what led to this foundational proposition, having been selected for these portraits (F3) as writers/art historians/theoreticians that we are (F2). The circle closes upon itself as x asks us to write about the portrait of us, writers (F5). In the end, this multiple, complex, circular exchange of different functions (active, passive/passive, active), when the agents (a, b, c) become acted upon (selected as ‘subjects’ of a portrait Project (P), before being returned to their initial status as agents (a, b, c,) writing/commenting on their own portrait, is extraordinary – and forces my admiration, as I am assuming is true of the other a, b, c, d, e, f … Here we are asked to not only look at, but also comment upon, the image of ourselves, painted,

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portrayed, made visible, obviously not because of our good looks. Here, I wholeheartedly subscribe to David Freedberg’s entry point to his comment: “I have always been terrified of having my portrait taken.” And Freedberg goes on expanding on the discrepancy between F2 and F3/F1, namely “the inscription on Dürer’s great portrait of Erasmus declaring that his writings show him better than the image itself.” But in the end, this is a tribute to LdB’s great generosity again: by introducing F5 (having us write about the image of us, painted by him), he does return us to who we are (F2/ people who write about art). Seizing upon the fun analogy that Freedberg produced (Erasmus declaring that his writings offer a more apt portrait of who he is, than the image itself…), LdB here gives us the very opportunity of having us doubling up, as it were, our visual portrait with its written response, by returning to who we are, not so much as what we look like, but as what we do: think and write about what we look at. To conclude, I propose to emphasize an aspect of this project (P) to which, no propositional function can do proper service: the dose of fun and humor that this project inherently carries through (at least, to my mind). Luca Del Baldo, having us look at what he made us look like (his portrait of us – and again here, I agree with Freedberg: this is practically the only portrait/image of myself I can bear looking at – and, further, having us write about our own image of someone who writes about art, reminds me of one of the very first works of art in cinematography: L’arroseur arrosé. I suggest that all participants and readers of this project watch this pioneering moment in the history of cinema. Here is the YouTube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlbiNuT7EDI One of the early titles in English of this glorious piece of comedy was: The Tables Turned on the Gardener. An apt title for Luca Del Baldo’s glorious project could be: The Tables Turned on the Art Historian … 2020

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Griselda Pollock

To encourage me to write a piece, Luca Del Baldo kindly sent me some examples of writings by his other sitters. I recognized many of the strategies that had passed through my own mind as I wondered: ‘What does an art historian do when asked to write about a portrait that is undertaken as a portrait of a thinker or a writer? As it happens, in my capacity as feminist writer on art, I have pondered a very specific question. What are the visual tropes that are available to signify the conjunction of the terms woman and thinker, let alone and creative artist. Feminist studies long since identified the profound correlation between image and woman, which is not only commonplace in our popular culture but has its roots in the art theory of the sixteenth century. In a series of brilliant articles the American art historian Mary Garrard analysed two remarkable self-portraits: one by Sofonisba Anguissola (1532 – 1625) of Cremona and another by the Roman painter Artemisia Gentileschi (1593 – 1656). Both play a subtle intellectual game with the viewer. Anguissola paints a picture of a painter at work on a canvas. The painter is a man, Bernardino Campi, who is named in the title. Thus we have a portrait of a painter at work. This is signified by the painting before him on his easel, the image of a woman on the canvas, and both his posture and gesture. The canvas bears, however, the image of a noble woman, the presumed sitter whose exquisitely embroidered robe he is

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currently painting although he has turned from the canvas to look across his shoulder, out of the picture space, at the dress of the imagined sitter. Yet the author of this painting of Bernardino Campi painting a beautiful woman is, in fact, the beautiful noblewoman herself, namely the painter Sofonisba Anguissola. Why, however, would one artist paint another artist painting her in such a way as to place her self-image in the imaginary space of another’s artistic creation? Careful analysis of the distribution of luminosity versus shadow and the different intensities of the painted gazes allows Mary Garrard to argue that Anguissola is negotiating, by means of this double portrait, the complexity of her position as aristocrat, woman and painter – already a novel but not impossible configuration in the mid-sixteenth century. More importantly she is cleverly playing back to her imagined audience aspects of contemporary art theory. That theory held that the most beautiful form of painting as the formulation of beauty is the painting of a beautiful woman. Can Anguissola represent her quality as an artist by demonstrating her own ability to produce this equation through her skill as a painter while reclaiming, at the same time, the more ­significant role as the creator of beauty, the artist, reducing the masculine artist Campi to being the product and image of her creativity. In the painting now labelled Self Portrait as La Pittura (London: Royal Collection, 1638 – 9), Gentileschi also played back to the contemporary artworld a similar entanglement of image, iconography and the problematic position within both of the woman who makes art. ‘La Pittura’ is the allegorical figure of painting or image. According to Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia, La Pittura is to be represented as a woman with dishevelled and wild hair (inspiration) in a beautiful multi-toned dress of scintillating colours, with a necklace bearing an image of a mask representing imitation, at work with a palette and brush. She should also have a bridle on her face covering her mouth to indicate the muteness of painting. Gentileschi dispenses with that silencing gag; but she conforms to all the other requirements. As a result in older, sexist times that is until 1962, the image hung in the Royal Collection as an anonymous representation of this allegory. Then cleaning revealed the signature linking the painting to Artemisia Gentileschi also known as Lomi, who had come to the court of Charles I to work with her estranged father Orazio. Once art historians looked harder at this work and bothered to study

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­ entileschi’s considerable œuvre it became clear that the artist had used G her own features, disrupting the allegorical by claiming for the image of painting as a woman, an image of a woman painting. Using her features does not make it a Self Portrait because this device is more complex. Garrard places this work in conversation with Velasquez (1599 – 1660), Las Meninas (1656) as examples of grand painterly statements by seventeenth century artists asserting, to their royal patrons, the importance of the painter. The artist no longer perceives her or his worth in terms of being a royal servant or of being the vessel of a divine spark. Instead, Garrard argues both paintings assert the correlation of art with work, with a special kind of work, however, artistic work which can only be represented by both the exercise of material making and the invention of the image as the paradoxical object that is both product and image of production. Gentileschi’s problem is different from that of Velasquez, who shows himself creating the image of the very sovereign power he is quietly contesting by representing his gaze observing his sitters in order to create an image neither his sovereign nor his viewers can see, even as this painting makes him the de-centred subject of this vast work. Gentileschi had to negotiate an ideology already inside the image itself, which could and did indeed collapse image and act so as to efface the creative woman in her image for many centuries to come. Unlike the many essays I have read of men who have been portrayed, who symptomatically struggle with the exercise of looking at images of themselves, my conversation with Luca Del Baldo in relation to his portraits of me involve a different relation between my gender and the image as well as a different iconographical and semiotic relation between woman and intellectual. One of my projects, many years ago, solicited by an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery of Self Portraits by artists who are women, was a rambling exploration of the problem of the missing iconography in western art of woman as intellectual, let alone as creative artist. The woman as intellectual does not have what the artist has at her disposal: the means to refashion the existing iconography, not always successfully in terms of recognition as I have suggested in the case of Gentileschi’s doubly misnamed painting. (First it was just La Pittura, now it is Self Portrait as La Pittura: neither catches what is really going on and no title could name the disruption that is being performed).

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I sent Luca two photographs, first one and then he requested a second one to do a second portrait. Something in the first felt not quite right. The first was a snapshot taken by my daughter as I sat at my desk turning away from my computer. I like this image because of the intensity of the gaze. Was that possible between two women both of whom are acutely aware of the conventions by which women are represented? When you have a passport photo taken you are required not to smile, not to open your mouth to look straight ahead. We know what kind of horrors that formulation can produce. Now face recognition technology used in passport control requires the same expressionless offering of the face to the inhuman look of the digital scanner. The other image was a commissioned portrait photograph taken several years later in which lighting and background produce the falsity of the formal look. You stand sideways on, head slightly cocked and avoid beaming smiles that crinkle up the eyes while having to soften the face with a hint of a warmth in an incipient smile. The second photograph, the older version, betrays a surprising sense of uncertainty, a shadow of the anxiety of offering oneself to this process of having an image taken. It becomes a performance of a certain ‘femininity for the camera’, whereas the earlier image has a directness, frankness, even a certain intensity delivered because it is less self-conscious. The difference between the two, as I read them as a feminist analyst of the image, is a difference between an image of a gaze and an image offered to a gaze. In this case the forthright gaze, intensified by the close crop excluding the cluttered background of my study becomes the visual signifier of intellectual activity. In the age of the philosophes of the Enlightenment, a different iconography was generated for the new secular intellectual. Louis-Michel Van Loo (1707 – 71) painted Encyclopaedist Denis Diderot (1713 – 84) in 1767. Wigless, in a wonderful purple silk dressing gown Diderot sits at a desk, quill in hand, poised above the paper on which he is writing. He has paused in mid-stream to look up but away from the painter, as if ab­­ sorbed in inner thoughts, a condition further indicated by his left hand raised and almost pointing to the invisible point of the gaze of the thinker processing the thought that will soon be set down on the paper. Closer to home (art that is) Anton Maron (1733 – 1808) portrayed the founder of art history, Vatican librarian Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717 – 68) also in 1767. His indoor robe is even more glorious – an envi-

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able salmon pink, fur-lined silk robe with an almost matching turban to warm his hairless head. He, too, is at his desk, quill in hand, resting on his manuscript. He is studying and writing about an engraving of Emperor Hadrian’s beloved, Antoninous. He has stopped writing to look out, his gaze directed at the point at which the painter once stood and the viewer now stands. As if opening the conversation, his left hand is also ‘talking’ with its open demonstrative gesture. Both of these portraits locate the visually gorgeous in the accessories – the costume – while gaze and hands indicate thought or analysis. The intellectual also has attributes of work: the materials for setting down thought – writing – and in the case of the art historian as intellectual, he is given the object of both analytical (and erotic) gazing. Winckelmann’s outward gaze is a steady as Diderot’s is inwardly activated by being shown as outwardly distracted from the immediate world of things. In neither of my portraits are there the tools of my trade nor the objects of my professional activity. Neither are there any devices such as we see in Anguissola’s or Gentileschi’s calculated artistic gambits that undo the dominant ideological tropes that render their gendered creativity invisible even as they might become the sign of the visible image as woman. What you are seeing then in these two images is not the visual sign of GRISELDA POLLOCK, an author name, a name associated with the spines of books or academic citation. But then what relation is she to a woman sitting in her study being photographed by her daughter, or a woman being professionally photographed for her university’s compensatory, patronising, possibly reparative exhibition of ‘Women of Achievement’. We form a gallery in the great Parkinson Court of the University of Leeds in a context where the Council Chamber like so many academic institutions surrounds the room with portrait after portrait of the men who have run the world for ever. None of them smile shyly. They are stern and steadfast to a man. It is a confusing situation. Be visible under a rubric that sets you apart as the exceptional ‘Women of Achievement’ or remain invisible. Of course things are changing and there are portraits of Vice Chancellors who are women. There are even portraits of women as political leaders. But there again we find the problem. A Man in a suit is the Prime Minister or President. The Woman in her suit is an object of press trivialisation and comment on the price of the suit or the shoes, the designer, the style: in a word fashion and attractiveness.

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I think Luca likes the second portrait better as it is probably a more ‘human’ portrait. For me the originating photograph is pierced by complexity and political unease. The composition of the first portrait feels bolder because there is so little space around the face to contain the figure. It is a portrait that relentlessly brings the viewer face to face with … just that a face, but also a head, without the body, with little flesh or fleshiness, with a look that that signifies more closely what I do: look, study, analyse, examine, closely. As an image of an art historian, it does not create the kind of additional signs that we find in Maron’s image of Winckelmann. It embodies the act of intense attentiveness in a gaze that matches the incoming look at it as a painting. The effect of the older portrait now comes to me as quizzical, with a hint of the first image in the liveliness of the look. But scale, setting and the wonderfully rich painterly realization of skin tones and the signs of time and laughter written on the face make an image that is more containable as a portrait of a woman, mature, solid, direct. Yes, indeed. But the intensity of the earlier portrait with its frontality, its leaning forward to meet the incoming look of the spectator and the focus of the image in the eyes speaks to me as an art historian wondering how images can loosen the bond between concept of the feminine as that which is looked at and fashions itself to be looked at, and, on the other hand, the concept of the thinker, the intellectual, the writer who is not only a woman but a feminist, a woman who professionally interrogates such questions. I am glad there are two images. I am happy to have had this (one-sided) conversation with this remarkable painter. One final comment. Some years ago, in 2002, in a curious twist of time I returned to Florence/ Firenze for the first time since 1964, the year my mother tragically died very young. The journey was heavy with that memory of a summer of sun- and art-filled mourning. For reasons that cannot be explained I had come equipped in 2002 on this return with paints, paper and brushes and with the intention of painting the Tuscan landscape. Thus I took up painting, untrained but probably inspired by what I call painting-envy, having spent so many decades analysing and explaining and teaching generations of fine art and art history students to ‘see’ painting. After sating myself visually on olive groves and lavender fields, I continued to paint when I returned home. Now I turned

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to memory rather than the world outside. I drew on the family’s photo album discovering a treasure trove of images created by doting parents of tiny, now grown, children. As an art historian who had studied long and written many times on the work of the nineteenth century Paris-based American painter, Mary Cassatt (1844 – 1926), I found myself in renewed dialogue with that painter’s attentive study of the strange qualities of the infant and child as ‘becoming-humans’. It was Cassatt who had noticed how strange and different babies and small children are compared to adult’s in terms of bodies, faces and their gestures. As a painter, I was infected with Cassatt’s scrupulous attention to their unformed faces and soft uncoordinated, differently proportioned bodies as much as their perplexed or inquiring gazes at a world as yet dimly understood. I was not, however, as was Mary Cassatt, observing the living, wriggling child before her as model. My sources were already stilled by photography, which means, in many cases, they were captured looking directly at the photographer, being photographed. My home is now filled with the awful products of this obsession. This means that the imaginary creatures look at me and at any visitor with the relentless gazes of many eyes. Indeed, when visiting my house, the curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev commented specifically in this curious effect of being looked at from every wall. This is the effect of my translation of what is normal, of course, in a photograph, but disconcerting when it is re-materialized into the conventions of painting. The gaze of the photograph is a transaction between something offered to a photo-mechanical gaze even if there is a photographer behind the camera. The gaze in the painting is produced by an observation searching through the artistically trained eye for the details that, if faithfully followed or materially registered will construct an image that is rebuilt stroke by stroke, wash by wash, passage by passage. Thus painting from photographs which formally also ‘build’ a picture means painting a stilled, freeze frame rather than watching the unstable living other over time to distill a composite ‘sense’ of this other in one’s own pictorial mode. Perhaps this explains my love of the first image from which Luca Del Baldo painted his first portrait. It has that same strange starkness that comes from the original photograph. It is something I reproduce in my paintings, seeking to see if the process of painting, another form of prolonged looking can pierce the momentary flash (archaic idea I know)

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that ‘took’ the photograph and take us closer to the presence that the eyes alone reveal in a human face. What are these coloured orbs? What is it they do in a face? The great and genuine portraitist finds her or his sitter in every feature, every trace of time written on the skin, every jut of the jaw, every curl of an ear, every, fall of the hair, every swell of the nostrils. The person is the face as a whole. For me, because these features in children are so softened and formless, it is the eyes that that indicate the person already present even in an immature and changing form. So it is that the first portrait remains strange but wonderful, while the second, a real portrait, remains estranged from me. This replicates my feeling about the two photo-

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graphs from which both are taken. The second portrait tells more of what I look like perhaps, while the first in its abrupt present-ness and direct gaze battles against the conventions of representation, ideology, tradition posing the question of what is good as art and what is good when it breaks through the deepest relations between art and the visual politics of gender. 2018

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Paul B. Preciado The Genderless Time

In a society convinced that there are only two radically different and opposed sexes, “changing sex” amounts to dying and being reborn in another body, with another voice, another name. Only the transition from the status of slave to that of a free man in slave-owning societies, spiritual conversion in societies marked by religion, or certain body modification rites in tribal societies, bear a resemblance to this unusual process – despite it being accepted in medicine and law, and now commercialized by the pharmacological and media industries. This was me: a man brought back to life with a testosterone-filled syringe in his pocket, a slave who had to buy his freedom and his name, a convert in a world whose religion is sexual difference. I remember a period between February and June 2015 during which, after having increased my dose of testosterone by 100 mg every sixteen days to 250 mg, it was no longer possible, for others or myself, to tell if my face was that of a woman or a man. Sometimes, walking the streets of Downtown Manhattan, I would spy my reflection in a window and see how my female face was disintegrating, while my male face had not yet taken hold. Testosterone had begun to dissolve a mask of the self, but had not yet replaced it with another. I called this period “the genderless time”. The new generation of trans activists, for whom I am a vintage figure, speaks of being gender fluid. But there was no fluidity in it. To the contrary, the transformation was a kind

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of delicate sculptural act, where any bad cut could ruin the stone for good. The process of producing a new face was akin to the way you might handle a Rubikcube, giving one new turn each day. There were periods of chaos until a new face suddenly appeared, with a recognizable gender, in the same way that if one just keeps turning that Rubikcube one will eventually achieve one monochrome side. The “genderless time” was a period of uncertainty, but it was also a period of lightness, as if all the relationships of property and inheritance, of guilt and debt disappeared along with sexual difference. If someone had tried to draw a portrait of me, it would have looked like one of James Ensor’s skeletal self-portraits. One can suppose that skeletons are not subject to the norm of sexual difference. In this sense, death carries away with it the weight of flesh, the excessive sensitiveness of skin, but also the clinging epistemology of sexual difference. A trans body is a body without a face, a body whose face has been replaced by a death’s head. Those who do not exist fully as political subjects have no face, just a skull. We are dead to the system. Also, the death’s head is an operator of transformation. There is no better way to represent the radical nature of transformation than to change one’s face into a skull, even though this implies pushing one’s portrait (the function of which is to represent individual singularity) to the point of absurdity. To skin a face so that it becomes a death’s head, is to make a “deep” portrait that takes into account the temporal (grotesque, mortal) dimension of each life. The death’s head is the universal mask. In “changing gender”, I was not worried by the idea of losing my face or my name. It was other people who tormented me with their omniscient knowledge, the institutions with their taxonomy, the administration with their forms, the borders with their requests for identification that are impossible to satisfy for someone whose face is in constant transformation. The wrong lies not in darkness. It grows in the insidious and omnipresent light of norms and of identity. In the desire to make everything, absolutely everything, visible. Modern men do not inhabit dark centuries. We are living in fiery, dazzling centuries, centuries scorched by artificial light. The sun has nothing on the acrid light of the nuclear bomb. I will never have any children; darkness will be my daughter. While walking the streets of New York, after about 7 or 8 kilometres I see on the horizon what seem to be the shapes of cathedrals. These are

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not buildings. They are spatial vessels waiting for someone with enough energy, enough faith to lift them off the ground. Then I imagine that all the existing cathedrals – Chartres, Burgos, Cologne, Saint Patrick’s too – all take off at once and transform the sky into a vault of sculpted stone. After several days, an injection of testosterone spurs a descent into the zone of disidentification. The loss of control over what you thought to be your own subjectivity. Two demons (or are they doctors?) lead me down a sperm-splattered road, to the gates of hell. Dangerous cooks are they who carry my own cooked woman’s head on a tray, to be devoured in a family banquet. God created Leviathan both male and female, then killed the female and gave it to the righteous to eat. At the gates of hell, it says: Nation-State. I knock at this gate. Beelzebub greets me. He asks me who I am, and I answer that my name is Paul. I promise that I will never again be Beatriz. I sign off on the death of my other self. He celebrates this event by giving me a new passport with my new name. Then I realize that Beelzebub looks like me. Neither a woman nor a man. He has a long tail and a penis with a vulva at the end. Inside hell the ritual of “doctrinal nourishment” is taking place: medicine, law, the army, the Church, the family, the market … all defecate on a multitude of little bodies. Such well-executed doctrinaire fanfares. Shit is dumped onto everybody, forming one smooth layer that we call “identity”: man, woman, heterosexual, homosexual, white, black, poor, disabled, mentally ill … When Beelzebub hands me my passport, I think about calling him father; but when I open my mouth, I say mother. When he hears this word, he transforms into a screen on which we see a girl sucking off Christ. Hey Jesus, King of #MeToo. Even hell is suffering from global warming. I come out of there like Ensor in his 1883 self-portrait: with a moustache and beard and wearing a hat with flowers and feathers. gender change is the voyage par excellence. I am as much taken by crossing national borders, as those of sex or gender. There are only political frontiers: they are Alice’s looking-glass, within which trans or migrant bodies could find themselves trapped forever. I travel constantly because I venerate the first encounter with a place, the first physical contact with an unknown object; whether it be a house, a piece of land, a forest, an engine room, a bar, a ruin, a whip, a painting, a car, a riverbank or a piece of confectionery, this does not matter. I seek out the moment where I still don’t know how to move in this space,

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how to use it. How to approach the object. The moment where I don’t know how or where I will sit down. Or what side of the bed I will sleep on. Where I don’t yet know what’s behind the door or what I will find in the cupboard. The very first moment a colour (a colour that will perhaps be unforgettable) collides with my retina and explodes in my brain. In some ways, I am addicted to the first erotic contact with a space – the first encounter, accidental or premeditated, with a place or an object. I only know the contours of my body by direct confrontation with these places that I have never experienced before. A different space, its volume, its warmth or its cool, its give or its hardness, enables me to redefine these edges. With the object I construct another body, extended or copied, which acts and lives just for a moment. The experience of promiscuity that others feel when in contact with the human body, I feel it with the apparently inert object, that I absolutely must integrate into my own body, rejecting its relationship of externality. This is where the hospitality I feel towards the prosthesis comes from, considering it an ephemeral organ of my body. In Ensor’s work, sometimes the colours of an object (a fabric, a tablecloth, a dress …) become diluted in space and form a single liquid texture on which figures float. Other times, the colour of the sky falls onto the ground and covers everything. Or the sea overflows and rises into the atmosphere as if sucked up from above. Or the colour of wheat spreads over the bodies of Adam and Eve in their expulsion from paradise. In The Expulsion of the Fallen Angel, the sky turns red and one can no longer differentiate body from fire. Under the regime of sexual difference, trans bodies are made up of bits of other bodies, organic or inorganic, that are put back together to construct a new body. Since neither the law nor anatomical science recognize our bodies as human, we are forced to constantly pretend that our body is female or male. Therein lies the paradox: medicine and the law do not consider the organs “I really have” as healthy and real; to the contrary, these same normative authorities assume that I have or should have a certain number of organs that “I do not have”. My body is a legal and anatomical miniature of Leviathan that the State and the market claim as belonging to them. Each takes aim at the trans body and tears it … From this wound writing flows like black blood. To be trans is to be the product of the graft, to not fear contamination, to accept that the possibility of becoming something else means we must abandon all

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identification and love the monster that sleeps within us, that feeds on ink and testosterone. 2019

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Jacques Ranciere Notes sur un portrait

Comment faut-il entendre le projet d’une « visionary academy of ocular mentality » ? Seul Luca Del Baldo peut nous rendre compte des termes qu’il a choisis. Tout au plus pouvons-nous formuler notre propre vision du problème que sa peinture entend résoudre en prenant la pensée dans le rapport ainsi déclaré entre l’oculaire et le visionnaire. Le visionnaire bien sûr implique toujours quelque excès sur l’oculaire. Mais l’excès n’est-il pas présent déjà dans le souhait de peindre des penseurs en tant que penseurs ? Cette entreprise porte à l’extrême le paradoxe habituel du portrait, ce paradoxe auquel nous ont confrontés tant de fois ces figures qui peuplent les salles des grands musées : des portraits jadis destinés à identifier des notabilités diverses : condottieri ou bourgmestres, magistrats, savants, nobles amateurs d’art ou riches marchands dont nous ne savons plus qui ils étaient sinon par la notice jointe, dont parfois des objets emblématiques disposés sur la toile – un insigne sur le costume, une arme au côté, une statuette caressée, un livre tenu dans les mains, une carte ou un manuscrit déroulé sur une table – nous rappellent le statut social ou la passion propre mais dont il y a en tout cas une chose que nous ignorons totalement, à savoir ce qu’ils pouvaient bien avoir en tête quand ils posaient pour le peintre. C’est d’ailleurs ce qui nous les rend précieux : que ces visages qui devaient signifier à ceux qui les regardaient telle ou telle identité et qualité spécifiques ne soient plus que des figures anonymes au secret soigneusement dérobé par des

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yeux dont l’énergie concentrée ne désigne plus aucune fin définissable ni l’air rêveur aucune pensée identifiable. Le portrait dit l’identité (quel visage correspondait à ce nom ou qui est représenté par ce visage) et la soustrait en même temps : il ne dit pas quel est ce qui, sauf à exagérer les traits qui doivent le signifier. Le philosophe Descartes ne livre rien de sa pensée au plus talentueux des portraitistes de son temps. D’autres peintres , bien sûr, s’en vengent en nous faisant reconnaître Démocrite à son rire ou Héraclite à son air mélancolique, assurés que nul jamais ne viendra objecter que ce n’est pas à cela que ces philosophes ressemblaient. Que l’identité soit ainsi dérobée sur le visage qui l’expose, c’est sans doute ce que reconnaissent ces portraitistes d’aujourd’hui qui, au lieu de se vanter de saisir, dans le temps figé de la pose, l’expression révélatrice d’une intériorité cachée, ont choisi de travailler d’après photographie. Il est vrai que le photographe, surtout s’il travaille pour un journal, peut s’être amusé lui-même à saisir la combinaison de sérénité démocritéenne et d’orage héraclitien identifiant le travail de la pensée sur le visage du penseur. La première photographie choisie par Luca Del Baldo était tirée d’un magazine culturel brésilien qui présentait à ses lecteurs « o pensador francês Jacques Rancière » : tête massive, regard très enfoncé, pose majestueuse. A partir de là, les empâtements par lesquels Luca Del Baldo veut rendre une peau à l’image photographique, en accentuant le jeu des ombres et des lumières sur les traits du visage, devenaient les tourments de la pensée travaillant la chair du philosophe. J’ai dû dire au peintre que c’était peut-être un portrait de la pensée mais non pas le mien. J’ai proposé alors une autre photographie, prise non par un photographe mais par un philosophe, non pour avoir une image de la pensée mais pour garder un souvenir personnel d’un événement auquel il m’avait invité. La photo, de fait, est introuvable sur la galerie proposée par Internet. Ce qu’elle peut avoir de pictural tient non à ce qui s’y exprime de pensée mais au fait que le regard y est pris dans le partage de la lumière qui répartit exactement une partie du visage dans la lumière et l’autre dans une demi-ombre. A partir de cette image Luca Del Baldo a entrepris un travail pictural dont il m’a envoyé deux versions : une étape intermédiaire et une version finale. Tout se passe, sur la première, comme si la couleur avait viré : l’atmosphère bleutée de la photographie a cédé la place à une dominante jaune-vert qui, bien que

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le peintre respecte la répartition des lumières et des ombres, semble extraire le visage de la pénombre pour le fixer en pleine clarté, comme s’il voulait d’abord, pour lui-même, savoir à quoi je ressemble, quelle que soit l’heure du jour et l’éclairage du lieu. Après quoi, il a rendu le visage au bleu d’où il l’avait extrait. Ou plutôt il a inventé une texture colorée qui circule entre le centre du regard et le fond du tableau en passant par les nuances bleutées données aux reflets et aux ombres sur le visage. On pourra alors aussi bien voir le tableau comme l’expansion de la puissance d’un regard ou ce regard comme la concentration ponctuelle du milieu sensible où il est immergé. On pourra même, si l’on veut, faire de cette réversibilité entre un regard et un univers sensible une image de la pensée à l’œuvre, enquêtant sur son monde et en concentrant la puissance- un double mouvement qui, dans mon lexique, pourrait se résumer dans le mot d’attention. Mais cette image de la pensée pourra être semblable à celle d’un individu, en l’occurrence semblable à mon image, sans que les deux se confondent dans l’image du penseur. Ce que je dis là bien sûr est pure imagination à partir de deux images. Je ne sais pas en fait ce que Luca Del Baldo a voulu faire ni par quels moyens il y est parvenu. A l’heure où j’écris ces lignes, je n’ai pas encore vu le tableau. J’en imagine la texture d’après deux photographies numériques que le peintre m’a envoyées du travail pictural qu’il a opéré à partir de la photographie numérique que je lui avais adressée. Cette distance vient s’ajouter aux écarts qui composent la dialectique du portrait. C’est comme un tour de plus dans le jeu mouvant des rapports entre identité, pensée, image et matière. 2017

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Franco Rella Verità delle immagini

Il problema dell’io che si costituisce e si costruisce di faccia al mondo e nel riflesso di se stesso nel mondo è stato a lungo al centro delle mie ricerche, tanto che ad esso ho dedicato due libri: Confini. La visibilità del mondo e l’enigma dell’autorappresentazione (1996) e negli occhi Vincent. L’io nello specchio del mondo (1998). La rappresentazione di sé mi si è presentata enigmaticamente, come un problema su cui indagare in profondità, nella figura di Narciso. La storia di Narciso non è un mito che affonda nel tempo. Questa storia, a differenza di ogni altro mito, ha un autore. È un racconto di Ovidio che ha però toccato così profondamente l’immaginario collettivo da trasformarsi in un mito, che ha attraversato tutto l’Occidente. Il centro oscuro e al contempo abbagliante di questa storia, che la rende inaggirabile e necessaria, sta nel fatto che Narciso, l’io, il nostro io, scopre se stesso in una immagine riflessa e ingannevole e, al contempo, proprio in quesra fallacia scopre la terribile verità della morte. L’aveva detto l’indovino Tiresia, l’indovino della tragedia, che è stato accanto a Edipo e poi a Penteo e ora a Narciso: egli vivrà a lungo “se non conoscerà e stesso”, perché conoscere sé significa conoscere il nostro destino di morte. Significa conoscere ciò che ci fa uomini, vale a dire, come dicevano i Greci, ciò che rende gli uomini “i mortali” e che faceva affermare a Sofocle: “molte sono le cose che sgomentano, nessuna sgomenta più dell’uomo”.

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L’amaro sapere che Narciso ha conquistato lo porta dunque alla terribile verità. Ciò che egli desidera è dentro di lui, ma questa ricchezza, a cui tende con ogni sua forza, “lo rende miserabile”. È il sapere della fragilità e della povertà umana, che è la stessa fragilità e povertà della fronda che sporge fiorita da un albero, per poi sfiorire e morire. Questo ora Narciso sa. Sa la morte. E questa non gli pesa, perché con essa cesserà il dolore. Ma l’immagine, questa “vorrei”, dice, “che vivesse più a lungo, questa che amo. Invece due moriremo in un’unica anima”. L’idea che un’immagine di sé possa sopravviverci è ciò può motivare la decisione di accogliere l’invito di Luca Del Baldo? Malgrado il mio interesse per la riflessione su sé ho poche immagini di me stesso, poche, pochissime fotografie. Dunque è necessario che io rifletta su cosa mi ha spinto ad affidare a Luca Del Baldo una mia immagine fotografica perché la elaborasse in un ritratto ad olio, come quei ritratti che mi hanno fissato inquietanti dalle pareti di tutti i musei che ho visitato. Cerco di guardare nel nodo in cui si stringono motivazioni diverse. Lo scatto fotografico è un istante intransitivo, soprattutto oggi con le macchine digitali e i telefoni cellulari: è un “ecco qui” che non ha spessore, è il dominio dell’ “ecceità”. Un ritratto ad olio richiede invece tempo. E molte cose capitano nel corso del tempo. Mi ha subito catturato l’idea di un lavoro di scavo sul mio volto per ­trasformare la fotografia in un ritratto. Cosa avrebbe trovato Luca Del Baldo nelle lunghe ore in cui con spatola e pennelli lavorava dentro i miei lineamenti? Avrebbe scoperto qualche verità, e se l’avesse scoperta, mi chiedevo come questa sarebbe emersa sulla superficie del quadro? E poi ancora: cosa avrei trovato io guardandomi nel ritratto? Vedendo alcuni stadi preparatori del mio ritratto mi sembra di poter dire che il tempo che ha occupato l’artista nel suo lavoro si è davvero calato sul mio volto: è diventato un mio tempo, un tempo vissuto, un tempo consumato. L’artista ha trovato tracce e ha seguito queste trecce, che sono diventate vie e sentieri, percorrendo i quali uno può figurarsi davvero quanto il soggetto lì raffigurato abbia vissuto, e dunque abbia anche patito. Le vie del tempo sono inevitabilmente anche via di patimento. Un’altra cosa mi ha attirato di questa impresa. La galleria di ritratti, l’ “atlante”, sarebbe stato una rassegna di filosofi, vale a dire di personaggi che esercitano il controllo della parola e che qui invece hanno

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deciso di esporsi in immagine, proprio in quelle immagini che il primo dei filosofi, Platone, aveva condannato come “imitazioni di secondo grado”, e dunque doppiamente ingannevoli. Ed effettivamente i ritratti di Del Baldo, che partono da un’immagine fotografica, sono ­davvero “imitazioni di secondo grado”. Sono una imitazione di una imitazione. Quello che Platone non ha mai accettato è che l’arte ha una verità, e che questa verità si situa precisamente nella tensioni di queste imitazioni che si attraggono e si respingono. E c’è infine il ruolo di Luca Del Baldo, non solo come il demiurgo della nostra verità o del nostro narcisismo, ma in quello che egli cerca per sé in questo gioco di imitazioni. Perché un atlante di filosofi, in una sequenza che non pare destinata ai luoghi e al sistema dell’arte, ma a calarsi invece in un libro? Noi stiamo consegnando all’artista non solo i nostri lineamenti che ci torneranno nel dono del ritratto, ma qualcosa che si depositerà in un libro, un libro di immagini che si affiancherà ai nostri libri di parole. Noi gli affidiamo i nostri tratti, ma anche le parole che ci hanno reso quello che siamo e quello che sembriamo. È Luca Del Baldo che ci ha scelti per il suo atlante, che forse rappresenta una sua aspirazione. Forse egli si sta trasformando in un filosofo, anche se un filosofo che lavora con il pennello. Forse il pennello è la lama con la quale egli cerca di attraversare non solo i nostri volti, ma anche le nostre parole, costruendo un percorso, un itinerarium mentis, alla verità. In questo caso alla sua verità. Sarà dunque nostro compito guardare oltre i nostri lineamenti raffigurati nel ritratto, oltre noi stessi per andare alla ricerca anche di questa verità. È questo che ci fa filosofi. Il compito non ha termine. Non è mai finito. 2016

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Amélie Rorty

When he was 23, Rembrandt painted a portrait of himself as a vain young man with a feather in his jeweled hat. Shading his meditative eyes, he highlights a vulnerable sensuous mouth. Like the person it (re)pre­ sents, the portrait has many pentimentos: the line defining his shoulders is strong but undefined. By 1628, he’d painted himself in full painter’s regalia, standing dwarfed in a large empty room, staring at a huge canvas that overwhelms him. An etched self-portrait of 1631-2 is more daring: hand on hip, he becomes an insolent dissatisfied young fop; at 33, still richly clothed, he is weary and suspicious. How could the young dandy that Rembrandt portrayed so skillfully have the insight to see through his many personae? Aged 25, Reynolds did a portrait of himself as a chubby young Artist holding a mirror and mahl stick, shielding his eyes with an uplifted hand, the better to see his work. Later, become Sir Joshua Reynolds, he presents himself as a lordly, worldly figure full of authority and assurance, no trace of quest or questioning left. Partial to hats and poses until old age, Goya favored profiling, looking over his shoulder the better to catch himself. All this is gone in disheveled sorrow, as he looks at us wanting to speak, to warn us of the world he had seen. Chardin, informal and unselfconscious genial lover of the ordinary, attentive to particulars, shields his bespectacled eyes with a visor.

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We scrutinize old sepia photographs of family reunions – strangers found in junk shops and adopted as fantasy ancestors – longing to inherit what we imagine are their sturdy certainties. And now, here we are, contemporary philosophers mediated by high tech photographs and the internet, presenting ourselves to Luca Del Baldo – painter of agony and dead heroes – , as if we were troubled tough guys, deep thinkers, reflectively confronting The Real with nary a trace of irony. Baring our faces, consenting to have our heads cropped, we hope he will reveal us to ourselves. 2012

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Barry Schwabsky

I’ll admit that I was perturbed when you offered to send me the painting you had made from an image of me that you had found on the Internet. You see, I don’t like looking at images of myself. I felt it would be ungrateful to the point of rudeness to turn down such a generous offer, but I felt sure that I didn’t want to hang the painting – that I wouldn’t want to have to look it. So my acceptance of your offer, Luca, was made with a certain guilty conscience: It seemed that the least distasteful course of action would be to take the painting, offer you some words of thanks, and then to quietly stash it in the back of a closet, like some aunt’s birthday present of an oddly patterned sweater. Why is it that I don’t like seeing my own image? I don’t know. I don’t mind seeing my reflection in the mirror, for instance. No problems there. While it’s apparent that the fellow who looks back at me as I’m shaving is no Cary Grant – the epitome of cinematic masculinity, don’t you agree? –  there’s nothing at all unpleasant about him. And above all, he strikes me as a person who’s comfortable with himself. But when I see myself in a photograph, it’s very different. This guy just looks goofy. There’s no taking him seriously. Or if so, then I can take him seriously only in a mode of suspiciousness. He looks to me like he’s hiding something, above all from himself. I can’t explain this disparity between the reflection and the image. Maybe it has something to do with the mirror’s reversal of left and right giving me a different perspective on the same face? Could

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be, but I doubt it. Or might it be that in looking at the reflection in the mirror, I take in the whole gestalt of the face at once, whereas when I look at the photograph I somehow see details before the whole – and for some reason I can’t fit the details together in the way I’d like? That sounds more plausible, but I’m still not quite convinced it’s the real explanation. In any case, therefore, it was with a certain wariness that I began to open the package containing my painting on its arrival in New York. I wasn’t really looking forward to beholding the parcel’s contents. But what was it that Clement Greenberg said? Ah, yes: “Whereas one tends to see what is in an Old Master before one sees the picture itself, one sees a Modernist picture as a picture first. This is, of course, the best way of seeing any kind of picture, Old Master or Modernist, but Modernism imposes it as the only and necessary way.” Well, what I saw when the painting emerged from the packing materials was not what was in the picture; it was (what I call) the painting (which is the same as what Greenberg called “the picture”) – or rather, not the painting, but simply, painting. In other words, a complex of painterly actions, a beautiful in­­ terweaving of colored marks that somehow add up to several things – an image of me, yes, but also an image of the low-resolution jpeg that you used as a source: One of the most fascinating things about the painting being precisely the subtle, almost intangible way the painter has evoked (without directly representing) the pixelized blur that occurs along certain edges within the image. So this is at once a painting of a person, a painting of a digital image of a person, and a painting, full stop. I don’t know if seeing the painting first is really always “the best way of seeing any kind of picture,” but it is a way of seeing that I like. And now moreover this way of seeing has reconciled me to seeing my own image, for contrary to my expectation, I have hung this painting on a wall in my home and I look at it every day with pleasure. I don’t mind looking at this image of myself because I can see it as a painting first – a very good painting, at that – and only then, by the by, as me. The painting has taken the sting out of the image. And I even fancy that because of this, it is becoming a little easier for me to look at other images of myself. The painting has restored to me a certain equanimity with respect to my appearance. And the friends who stop by to visit invariably admire the painting, first as a painting and then as a painting of their friend, my­ self; some of them are people with a deep understanding of art, others

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are laymen. Many are shocked to learn that you and I have never met. They feel that you have caught something that is somehow characteristic of me. Their admiration reinforces my conceit in my good taste and ameliorates my anxiety as to my looks. Other paintings have given me pleasure, but this one has also, you might say, made me a little happier – more like the guy I see in the mirror. 2014

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Gary Schwartz “We didn’t need dialogue. We had faces!”

Luca Del Baldo’s admission to me that Rembrandt was a favorite artist of his – how could it be otherwise? – inspired me to write a piece on Rembrandt seen in Luca’s perspective, as a painter and draftsman of faces. That idea was in the back of my mind when I went to a screening of Billy Wilder’s film Sunset Boulevard (1950), and the subject took on another twist. As often as I heard the line before, it now meant that much more to me when I heard Gloria Swanson complain to William Holden about the needless introduction of sound into movies, “We didn’t need dialogue. We had faces!” What’s the difference, I thought, between Rembrandt’s faces, Gloria Swanson’s and Luca Del Baldo’s? They all came into being when an artist contemplated and recorded the human face. What could be a more primal, irreducible act than that? The face of our mother is the first sight we see after birth; we are programmed to be acutely sensitive to the forms and expressions of faces. Surely the depiction of the face must be close to the degré zéro de l’imagerie. I probably could have built an argument to that effect with some well-chosen examples. However, I decided instead to make use of someone else’s choices, namely those of Google Pictures. The results of this sampling revealed that the depiction of faces is subject to the same kind of artistic and cultural choices as everything else in art, mother bonding or not. On Google, I called up the faces of Gloria Swanson, other stars of the silent film, the talkies, Rembrandt and Luca Del Baldo.

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[To enjoy the visuals (and you will), please perform the indicated Google picture searches.]

Gloria Swanson In all of these photos on and off screen, Gloria Swanson is projecting a persona. Some are movie roles, but even in the others, she is putting on a face. If there is a mode in which she is not acting, in which her face assumes an expression of its own, she has been able to keep it out of sight. Strangely, the expression of her film faces does not look any more forced than the snapshots. Great actress that she was, she lived her roles, endowing her characters with all the humanity in her. This possibility alerts us at once to the real existence of not a zero but a maximalist mode of facial depiction: the face as a living mask. (What will Hans ­Bel­ting say about this in the book on “face and mask” he tells us in this volume he is writing?)

Silent movie stars From a sample of silent-movie stars on another Google search, it would seem that Gloria Swanson was an extreme case. The off-screen photos of some others show them in what looks like a natural guise, while the role-playing is more visibly theatrical. Professionalism and personality are more clearly distinguished from each other.

Movie stars of the 1930s To test Gloria Swanson’s proposition about the redundancy of sound, I brought up a page of movie stars’ faces from the talkie era (“movie stars of the 1930s”). It would seem like her point is well taken. These actors did need dialogue to get their characters and actions across. There appears moreover to be less of a distinction between the studio portraits and the stills from their parts. What they are conveying depended on text and context.

Rembrandt portraits Looking at an assortment of Rembrandt portraits, self-portraits and “tronies” (face paintings), we find ourselves off the scale established by the movie stars. As different from each other as they are, as we would expect from an artist with Rembrandt’s inventivity, they share a common

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feature: self-contained dignity. This characteristic has been explored by Ann Jensen Adams in her book of 2011 Public faces and private identities in seventeenth-century Holland: portraiture and the production of community. Faces like these display to the world an emotional calm and a certain degree of detachment. This state was internal and nonresponsive; nevertheless, it portrayed to the seventeenth-century viewer an attribute of personality as important and a specific as those employed by Rembrandt in his portraits of men in active poses. This neo-Stoic state of tranquillitas was achieved through control of the turbulent emotions. I would go one step further than Adams and say that even Rembrandt’s portraits of men in active poses show them with unexpressive facial expressions. His sitters never smile, let alone laugh. There no teeth to be seen in Rembrandt portraits.

Luca Del Baldo visionary That is not entirely the case with Luca Del Baldo’s portraits of members of his visionary academy. The photographs provided to Luca by the sitters are in general freer and more expressive than Rembrandt’s faces, close to those studio portraits of Katherine Hepburn and Rita Hayworth, Jimmy Stewart and Clark Gable. (If only!) Pre-millennials like them, we are not worried, as Rembrandt’s sitters and he himself were, that it would diminish our dignity to crack a smile. This is not the same thing as expressing our emotions. In Luca’s renditions of our visages we seem actively to be emanating certain character traits, specifically friendliness and approachability. We are freer to present ourselves this way because our status as authorities and intellectuals is already established by being included in the academy. Which brings me to Gloria Swanson’s conviction that words are not necessary to convey the meaning of an image. She was not alone, nor was the attitude she expresses limited to the movies alone. Walker Evans, at the end of the decade of Sunset Boulevard, in 1959, wrote in an introduction to a book of road-trip photographs by the Swiss-American photographer Robert Frank: “For the thousandth time, it must be said that pictures speak for themselves, wordlessly, visually, or they fail.” Few art historians would agree with that statement, as many times as it might be said. Our first inclination would be to tell Walker Evans that

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words cannot be avoided in responses to art, that even when a text is lacking, there is always a context and a subtext, that a work of art is always entangled in more than one discourse, more than one narrative. That would also be my inclination. But who of us does not understand what Evans means? Do works of visual art not enjoy more than one existence, in the purely optical realm as well as in the overcommentaried culture? And do we not walk past or skip over visually disappointing paintings and photos without stopping to ask what they might mean? To my eye, Luca Del Baldo’s portraits pass that test with ease. They engage us on their own, as a gallery of portraits worthy of contemplation and rumination one by one and as a group. That the sitters then turn out to be people who have lavished words on works of art enriches the experience and rewards the viewer with unexpected possibilities to delve into their ideas and perhaps to seek links between the visages and the views of the members of Luca’s visionary academy, to which I am proud to belong. 2018

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Salvatore Settis

Tre cose mi colpiscono nel progetto ritrattistico di Luca Del Baldo. La prima è l’idea stessa di identificare nel ritratto, con sapienza pittorica ma anche con fedeltà al vero, il mezzo privilegiato per tessere un discorso sulla (sua) pittura. Il dominio della fotografia e la sua pretesa di verisimiglianza ha allontanato dall’orizzonte dell’esperienza comune l’aspettativa di un ritratto che sia ‘eloquente’ perché riconoscibile a tutti, ma anche perché dice qualcosa della persona rappresentata. Ma il progetto di Luca Del Baldo non è una forma arcaizzante (peraltro impos­ sibile) di ritorno a ‘prima della fotografia’, bensì contiene – almeno così a me pare – la domanda più difficile, su che cosa possa veramente essere un ritratto pittorico dopo la diffusione universale del ritratto foto­ grafico. Collegata strettamente a questa è la seconda cosa che vorrei evidenziare: l’idea, austera anzi ardua, di lavorare non su soggetti in posa, ma su fotografie; e sulle fotografie che possono trovarsi in rete. In tal modo Luca Del Baldo elude il classico rapporto fra il pittore e il committente in posa: rifiuta il realismo della presenza viva in favore di un altro e più sofisticato realismo ‘di secondo grado’, una sorta di quid medium che la foto di un volto umano, elaborata e tradotta in pittura senza concessioni né alla fretta né alla banalità dei linguaggi, può restituire come una sorta di verità interiore, per così dire “scavata” nella fotografia dal pittore stesso. Nel suo progetto, Luca Del Baldo esalta la fotografia ponen-

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dola in luogo del modello vivo, ma insieme la respinge in una sorta di retrobottega dell’arte, perché manipolandone i dati mediante la pittura la riveste di una più intensa verità ‘di natura’. Il gesto pittorico, partendo dalla fotografia, ne legittima il gioco di luci e d’ombre, ma lo dichiara insufficiente, e perciò lo traduce in una ben più sapiente sinfonia di colori. Infine, il terzo punto è la scelta di puntare simultaneamente su due dimensioni apparentemente incompatibili fra loro: una serie di ritratti di intellettuali da lui stesso scelti uno per uno, quasi una sorta di ‘ritratto di gruppo’, lo spaccato di una società e delle sue forme di pensiero, ma al tempo stesso anche una galleria di ritratti individuali fortissimamente caratterizzati (uno per uno) da uno studio puntuale, minuto, con attenzione a dettagli fisiognomici irripetibili, a fattori espressivi e a dati di carattere, insomma a quello che gli antichi Greci avrebbero chiamato l’ethos di ognuno dei rappresentati. In tal modo le persone del gruppo (che spesso non si sono mai incontrate fra loro) diventano i co-protagonisti di una larga e intensa conversazione che deborda dai margini del quadro, e sotto la regia del pittore si propone come l’imprevista istantanea di un’epoca, la nostra. Individuo e gruppo possono perfino essere in dissidio fra loro, suggerire dissensi e divaricazioni; o convergenze impensate; o discorsi in sospeso. Parole non dette si sprigionano dai volti. Volti che parlano, perché il pittore lo vuole. Parlano non solo o non tanto fra loro, ma a chi guarderà la galleria nel suo insieme. Parlano al pittore, ma anche del pittore e del suo interesse profondo nell’esplorare, nei volti, l’animo umano. 2012

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Richard Shiff Painting, Photography, Portraiture

Luca Del Baldo has painted my portrait. Or perhaps he has painted something other than my portrait – he has painted a portrait of me. The distinction pertains to the use of a photograph as the primary model for a portrait image, a source at least once removed from the living person. Such a painted portrait is a portrait of a portrait, a picture of a picture. With respect to his project, The Visionary Academy of Ocular Mentality, Luca cites the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, who articulated the “ontological value” of pictorial portraiture through a characteristically Hei­ deggerean tension between active and passive states of being, transitive and intransitive situations of language. The portrait becomes a special genre of representational picture-making: “Here an individual is presented in a representative way. … The man represented represents himself in his portrait and is represented by his portrait. … What comes into being in [a portrait] is not already contained in what [the model’s] acquaintances see.” Gadamer’s theorization calls to mind two conditions that I’m willing to consider as factual. First, that each of our momentary appearances is a staging or performance of both an individualized self (active) and a social identity (passive). Second, that the early subjects of photographic portraiture “grew into” their image while they modeled for the camera (as Walter Benjamin phrased it, somewhat metaphorically, in his “Short History of Photography”). Because of the extended exposure time, sit-

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ters of the 1840s interacted with the photographic apparatus, assuming a role in the representational exchange that was as active as that of the camera and light-sensitive plate. In this respect, models sitting for a commercial daguerreotypist responded to their situation much as they would in the more rarefied atelier of a painter. But with advances in the sensitivity of photographic emulsion, the subject of camera portraiture no longer had time to “grow” into anything; and the experience of being represented by a camera diverged from the experience of being represented by paint, which had always been paced to the motor capacities of the human arm and hand. Photography – and eventually flash photography – introduced a phenomenological shock, causing painting to seem organic and harmonious by comparison, no matter how disjointed or discordant it became in its twentieth-century modes. Yet, during the early historical period of photography, the two media enjoyed a sym­ biotic relationship. Photographers used painted backdrops for their portraits and often posed their subjects to resemble the figures seen in museums of painting. Simultaneously, Delacroix and other painters were using photographs as aids to their study of human form, replacing the presence of live models in the studio and eliminating much of the need for drawings that the so-called Old Masters had presumably rendered from live models in generations past. During the nineteenth century, it became increasingly common for a portrait photograph to guide the execution of a painted portrait. When I posed for the photograph that Luca used to portray my image, the act required little concentration or energy on my part. I recall no awareness of growing into the image or collaborating in its production. A friend took the picture without any advance planning by him or by me. With hardly any hesitation, we chose a classroom blackboard as background because it would establish a neutral surround, avoiding visual distraction and any possibility of a detailed allegorical interpretation on the part of others. The photograph was intended to be “objective” – naturalistic, a good likeness, lacking pretense – though effects of objectivity are historically determined conceits. Such is our current theoretical doxa, for better or worse: we are conditioned to believe that all is cultural and ideological, nothing is natural and objective. To regard a condition, situation, or value as natural is to have fallen prey to ideology (the reasoning is circular). Despite current theoretical qualms, certain

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types of image nevertheless continue to function “objectively.” To regard this as a valid social fact is merely pragmatic. Luca customarily resorts to a photograph as his model, but he needs to feel that it leaves an appropriate impression. Perhaps the image should seem natural to whatever the painter understands about his subject. Luca found the photograph with the blackboard background acceptable, but it was not the first one that I submitted for his use. After devoting considerable time to painting from a different photograph, he decided that something about its appearance was interfering with his progress. He determined that he should begin anew, working from another image. The background of the first photograph was nearly as plain as that of the second that replaced it. The first, however, included fragments of a grid of latticework designed to articulate an exterior wall; pictorially, this feature relieved the uniformity of the background, making it less recessive in a compositional sense. Luca remarked, I think facetiously, that the chance resemblance to a cross – where elements of the grid of lattice extended above and to the sides of my head – may have disturbed him. Ironically, this configuration also resembles the structure of a painter’s easel. “I would be intimidated by the model from life,” Luca tells me. Moreover, had he not used a photograph as his source – our go-between – I would have needed to sacrifice my working time for the sake of his. And given my location in Austin and his in Como, we would have confronted logistical problems. Imagine, however, that I suspended my own professional endeavors and agreed to travel to northern Italy to pose before the painter. In turn, Luca would have to exercise tact; he would need to acknowledge my cooperation and attend to my feelings as I became the more passive participant in this instance of human interaction. Despite the active-passive distinction, he and I might “grow into” each other’s image (people tend to imitate those with whom they associate closely). My living presence might well affect the living portraitist’s style, whether he approved of the influence or not. Cézanne, hardly known for tact, insisted that his dealer Vollard remain utterly immobile while posing for the portrait of himself that he commissioned in 1899. Cézanne complained that his subject kept shifting in his chair – perhaps the cause of the painter’s abandoning the work at a late stage, having failed to resolve its details to his satisfaction. He

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called upon Vollard to mimic the stillness of an apple that “sits” on a table. Apples don’t move, Cézanne said. Nor, to their great advantage, do photographs. Days and years pass, as the photographic model remains always the same. Chuck Close told me that he needs to use photographs as his models because he would otherwise detect daily changes in the appearance of his subject – the gain or loss of half a pound, even the slight increase in length of hair. An extraordinarily acute observer, Close could sense such physical differences, not to mention traces of a changing emotional state. If he were to work from life, he would feel compelled to register every observation, adjusting the image each time the model reentered the studio. When Luca says, “I would be intimidated by the model from life,” he may be alluding to an emotional interaction that would ensue because of the intimacy of the painter-model relationship (which requires tact). But, like Close, Luca might also become overly attentive to the living being’s physicality, suffering interminable delays in completing the representational task. My unscientific experience with representational painters leads me to conclude that the majority use photographs as their immediate source, as opposed to turning to nature or the human presence. Artists have worked from photographic prints ever since this technological medium became commercially viable and relatively inexpensive. With remarkable efficiency, the camera resolves many of the issues associated with projecting the image of a volumetric form, such as the human head, onto a planar surface like a drawing sheet or a painter’s canvas. Today, as in the past, many painters practice photography. The single-point perspective of the camera tends to acuteness, that is, it accentuates effects of recession. For capturing the image of an object close up, whether a human head or an apple, the photographer may resort to a narrow depth of field, so that salient features are sharply defined and less significant elements included within the scope of the lens appear less focused and blurry. Such variable resolution within a photographic image is systematic, consistent, and predictable, given the initial choices of the operator of the equipment. With digital photography, details are subject to arbitrary adjustment; but various features of analog photography had always been manipulated to compensate for undesirable effects or deficiencies in the standard process. The possibility of tinkering with the image does not in itself distinguish photography from painting.

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Painting is – or can be – far removed from photography, despite the latter being so useful to the former. For many years, I spent an appreciable amount of time making paintings. Some were exercises in process, timing, and gesture. Others were inventive abstractions that were not abstractions of anything that could be reliably identified. Still other among my paintings were representational, and for these I most often – like my contemporaries – selected a photograph as the model, imitating aspects of its tonality and perspective. With few exceptions, I chose sources in black-and-white; yet my interest in painting centered on saturated chromatic colors. At times, I worked entirely freehand; on other occasions, focusing on the effect of photographic perspective just as it was, I applied a grid as an aid to reproducing the proportional relationships among the representational elements. Regardless of the degree of fidelity to my source, I felt free to invent the color as I proceeded; the configuration of a blurry half-tone photograph from the daily newspaper might reappear as a painting in red, green, turquoise, and pink. Treating photographic images as objects of flexible fantasy, I introduced elements of focus and blur arbitrarily. On occasion, the blur of half-tone generated passages of hard-edge painting. At times, I painted portraits, but never as naturalistically as Luca does. And I don’t profess to be accomplished as a painter in the way that he is. Here I introduce my studio experience only to reflect on our common use of photography. The shared element of our practice is hardly coincidental because we live in an age in which photography and its derivatives, including various forms of electronic display, have generated our normative cultural imagery. It is commonplace for images to appear extremely thin and flat in their physicality (as opposed to their opticality), like the screen image of film projection, or even more so, like the digital screen of wireless projection. With all these historically specific conditions constituting the environment that painters occupy, the practice of their medium nevertheless retains the spontaneity that characterizes any process of inventing forms by hand – at least to the extent that the hand resists becoming mechanized. Let the hand be itself, rather than mimic a machine, though the distinction blurs, because so many machines have been designed to operate like hands. Configuration by the hand of painting entails one judgment after another, as each successive gesture compensates spon-

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taneously for whatever imperfection may be perceived in the preceding gesture. We refer to this process as an instance of hand-eye coordination. It also represents the coordination of body and mind, physicality and mentality. I asked Luca to describe aspects of his portrait process, and he quickly obliged. I’ll isolate some elements of his account that seem consistent with my own way of thinking about the stakes of representing a specific person, as opposed to a type. (Yet we can’t easily deny that our reali­ zation of specificity is informed by our sensitivity to cultural types; as in the hand-machine distinction, each of the two factors, individ­ual and type, implies its antithesis – circularity again.) Here is Luca, excerpted: “I apply a grid and then I draw on the canvas [and then] accentuate the visibility of the brushstrokes. … Sometimes I don’t use the grid and I only work taking measurements and by freehand. … I use a medium for impasto.” In this last respect, painting most clearly diverges from photography, for photography has no texture, virtually no tactile component; it projects a continuous surface in contrast to the broken, fragmented surface of painting, which proceeds mark by mark. Another of Luca’s comments is relevant: “I take a lot of time on each portrait; but my brushstrokes are fast, and I do the painting several times, scraping and destroying with [a] spatula.” Photography is fast in its wholeness, whereas Luca’s painting is slow, yet fast in its parts (similarly, de Kooning made fast marks, but, as he noted, could spend hours looking and thinking as he contemplated what quality of mark should follow next). Still more from Luca: “In the portrait I must see the ‘flesh’ and the light is crucial, in short not a general flatness.” I think not only of how Luca articulates facial features through his variable facture but also of how he animates incidental features within the image. The shirt I was wearing displays a regular grid, appearing irregular because of its folds around the body. Luca renders an additional level of naturalistic irregularity by choosing to exaggerate the effect of the light striking the fabric. He does something analogous in representing the blackboard background, no longer quite so neutral: “Photography is my model, but I’m not interested in a slavish copy.” In the end, the materiality of Luca’s process of portraiture – capitalizing on the play of light and the textural resources of paint – introduces him to the physicality and even the

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morality of his subject: “The interesting thing for me is not to know the subject of the portrait personally (only through [their] writings and books) and to get acquainted through [their] image, or ‘Maia’s veil,’ or simulacrum, an investigation through the surface looking for greater depth. Then, my meeting with one of my subjects is very outstanding.” It seems that a painted portrait, the result of an experiential process as much emotional as observational, captures the depth of the soul of the model along with a surface of photographic appearance. The process of painting also captures the artist’s soul, exposing it. We might conclude that Luca himself “grows into” the subject he portrays. He doesn’t converge with or become the other; this would be too extreme and perhaps inhuman. Instead, he achieves insight, the other’s along with his own. 2019

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Richard Shusterman Portraiture as a Performative, Collaborative Art

Painting is typically not grouped with the performing arts, whose works have a temporal ontology of dynamic events rather than of static objects like canvases. But there is more to an art than the object which is its end product. There is artistry and aesthetic experience in the process of creating that work. Successful portraiture requires more than painting talent; it demands of the artist a certain skill or artistry of mis-en-scene in placing the subject in the right setting, posture, or light; it also demands a talent for rendering the subject psychologically at ease and open so that the painter can capture an expressive quality of the subject that is not marred by awkward embarrassment, anxiety, or resistance. As the process of painting can be rather long, the painter needs the talent to sustain the subject’s comfortable openness and continued interest for a considerable period. Of course, the subject sitting for the portrait should display correlative artistry in relaxed self-expression, composure, and interest. There is a dialogical relationship or focused interaction between painter and subject that can be an aesthetically rich experience in itself no matter the aesthetic quality of canvas that emerges from this collabo­ rative process. Moreover, by means of this process over time, the painter can get a better knowledge of the subject’s personality or character that can be incorporated into the portrait, thus giving it greater depth. I never had my portrait painted before, though it was occasionally proposed to me. Besides being reluctant to take the time, I thought that

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sitting would likely be an uncomfortably awkward experience for me. Not skilled in posing I felt very unconfident about achieving a natural look or even staying still long enough to satisfy a painter. Luca Del Baldo’s method of portraiture solves this difficulty (and corresponding challenges for the painter) by disposing of the need for any extended sitting or indeed any real-space encounter with the subject. A photo snapshot does the job of sitting. But portrait photography, though unlike painting in demanding almost no time, presents similar challenges of capturing the subject in a way that is both natural and posed. Like Roland Barthes, I have trouble posing for a camera, not knowing which “look” to present and also not knowing how proprioceptively to achieve that look through my facial muscles, even if I could decide the look I wanted. The best snapshots of me are taken by women I like and trust. The snapshot Luca used was taken by my wife Erica one lazy summer weekend afternoon while I was lounging in bed, unshaven and wearing a t-shirt. An artist by training (principally sculpture), Erica is an indispensable, indisputable co-creator of this artwork. I wouldn’t have posed in that disheveled way for a stranger making my portrait, photographer or painter. If the mere mechanism of the camera captured my momentary image, it was her knowledge, her energy, our intimacy that shaped my expression and thus, in a sense, created the subject that Luca painted. Erica took only a moment to take the shot (though one might say she spent many years preparing me for it). Luca worked far longer in creating his painted portrait, pursuing a dialogical process of getting to know me by e-mail exchanges and by reading my texts, consulting with me about his progress with the portrait and even sharing with me some of its earlier stages. I had no advice to give, partly because I had no particular idea of what I wanted the painting to express, so I just tried to be encouraging. This was easy because Luca is a great painter. I do not know how Luca’s reading informed his vision of me. Nor could I say how my philosophy is expressed in the portrait. Each time I look at the portrait I see some other expressive quality. But this is surely apt for a philosopher with pluralist tendencies, keen to explore the varieties of experience. Writing these lines in Beijing by working from a digital image, I have not yet seen the physical portrait, which Luca sent from Italy and Erica received at our home in Florida. The two artists in their different genres

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who fixed and reworked the fleeting image thus also complete the collaborative journey of the work, while the subject remains absent, on the way, incomplete, and in motion. That too is an apt image. 2012

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Iain Sinclair Painting the Glass

Somewhere breath stops and the process of transformation begins: man against wall, a barrier to keep ageing bones upright, to halt that plunge into black nothingness. Digital seizures come cheap, without discrimination. Wipe or swipe as required. The interrogation of the painter is more considered, labour intensive, open to a braver register of failure. The painting of the treated photograph of the accidental self-impersonation of this man, the unsecured subject, opens a lengthy negotiation. What the painter actually achieves is a purer sense of the temporal: time lost, time smeared, time cancelled, time reprieved. The red of bricks, dug from a quarry and baked, becomes a chill blue, a vertical ocean of contemplation and solitude. Thin spectacles keep paint from tired eyes. The title of a film by Stan Brakhage – The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes – confirms the necessary limits of the project. ‘If you focus your own eyes sharply … you will notice irregularities in whatever kind of film strip you hold, in even the most so-called opaque or blank,’ ­Brakhage wrote. The subject of a portrait, never sitting for (or even meeting) the remote painter, is condemned to remain opaque, a simulacrum of life. He is a cartography of flaws. An autobiographical narrative of marks on canvas: erasures, improvements. It is possible in this way, unlanguaged or mute, to become fluent in the light of colour, translated to some remote place, a studio, a lake. London vanishes. The painter, at some point, decides that he has done enough. The subject

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tries to walk out, to return to the original wall, the same doorway. They have vanished, but his shadow is still there. 2013

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Peter Singer

When I look at Luca Del Baldo’s portrait, I see a familiar face with a wry smile, not entirely joyful, but still able to look at the world in a positive manner. And that’s me. Why am I not joyful? Well, the state of the world is not one we can regard with unrestrained joy. According to the World Bank, approximately 700 million people are living in extreme poverty. And each year nearly 6 million children die before reaching their fifth birthday. Most of these deaths are preventable. Those of us living comfortable lives in affluent countries have the means to prevent them, by donating just a small fraction of our incomes to effective organizations working to reduce poverty. We can find the most effective organizations on websites like www.thelifeyoucansave.org. Yet few of us do it. Nothing to be too cheerful about here. Then there is the way we ruthlessly exploit animals, which is something I have been concerned about since 1970, when I first learned that the animals I was eating are often confined indoors for their entire lives, in miserable, crowded, unhealthy conditions. I stopped eating them and started writing Animal Liberation, arguing that we are guilty of speciesism, a prejudice against taking seriously the interests of members of other species. Now we have also discovered that meat is a major contributor to climate change, another important reason for a plant-based diet. What, then, is there to smile about? First, the number of people in ex­ treme poverty and the number of children dying are both steadily

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declining. A decade ago, when I was writing my book The Life You Can Save, the number of people in extreme poverty was over a billion, and the number of children dying before their fifth birthday was nearly 10 million. Other indicators of poverty, such as the percentage of people completing at least primary education, or having sanitation, are also heading in the right direction. For animals, the global picture is much more gloomy, largely because of the increase in meat consumption in China and other parts of Asia. That’s due to increasing prosperity, which is a good thing for humans, but its dietary consequences are a disaster for animals and for the planet. Still, I try to focus on the positives, especially the boom in vegan eating, and the progress being made in developing new plant-based foods and even “cultured meat” – real meat, produced from cells in vitro, not from a sentient animal, and without releasing methane into the atmosphere. The emergence of the Effective Altruism movement has also given me something to feel good about. As I have described in The Most Good You Can Do, many people, especially of the generation that has come of age in the new millennium, are making their lives more fulfilling by trying to make the world a better place. Moreover, in contrast to older-style giving to charity, which is often based on emotional appeal without any real knowledge of what does the most good, effective altruists use their head as well as their heart. They are gathering evidence about how they can get the best value for their money, or their time, and thus do the most they can to make the world a better place. They are living proof that our human nature does not condemn us to be thoughtless and selfish consumers, thinking only of ourselves and never caring about strangers. Surely that is worth a little smile. 2018

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Catherine M. Soussloff Journey into Now: Luca Del Baldo’s Portrait of Me as Selfie

Principles of work The uncanny visits itself upon us when we are acutely attuned to others, and shows us that which we know must have been there all along, but which we were too insensitive to notice. Luca Del Baldo’s initial email inviting me to participate in The Visionary Academy of Ocular Mentality came at a moment when I had just begun a new writing project, after a long period of illness-induced inactivity. To preserve my energy, I had to focus. My interminable project on Michel Foucault’s relationship to painting – which he defined at one point in terms of photography – gave me just the right amount of familiarity I needed to begin writing again. Much as I appreciated Luca’s invitation and the project as he and David Carrier described it, I put him off, or at least I thought I had. After many months and several email exchanges in which I continued to delay, the following email arrived on the night before my birthday, three weeks after the beginning of our present Coronavirus confinement: Dear Catherine, I hope you are fine, Please, send me quickly (if you can) some photographs of your face in good res. I would paint your portrait. There is not much time, sorry. The book is edited and finished. Warmest greetings from another red zone, Luca.

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I replied: Hello Luca: I hope you are safe and healthy in Italia. I am so sorry that the virus has been so serious there. I am happy you are still working. I am sending you these two photos. You can zoom in on face if you want close up. Or tell me to send something else and I will take them from another source. Thanks and take care. I was meant to leave for France tomorrow. I am just stuck in Vancouver!

I was in. Somehow, I felt that Luca had intuited that the situation had completely changed; that I was a year older; that I had been isolated from all social contact in a small apartment for the foreseeable future; that I had been regretting at that very moment all the times I had de-sensitized myself to the gifts of others, to the invitations to join in, for the sake of completing my own projects. But it was not so easy to jump across the visual barriers imposed by the conceptual structures that Luca had established for his project, that is, an exploration of the history of portraiture in dialogue with his subjects and the techniques and technologies of painting and digital photography. His system had requirements, as his next email revealed: Unfortunately, the photos you sent me are really of low quality, I can hardly see your beautiful face … It would take a close-up, to also see your eyes well, the anatomy of your face. Could you send me one or two better photos of your face. A selfie by your iPhone is also fine. At the airport? It could be interesting. This would help me a lot. Thanks so much for your understanding and kindness. Glad you’re in the project, even if we are really closing. Hugs from Italy (another red area), Luca

After our sporadic correspondence over many months, with this email I finally understood the criteria of the project. For me, a camera-shy subject by nature and experience, Luca gave me “the selfie solution” and the reasoning behind it: close-up with eyes emphasized, “better photos” of the face (not the body), and the particularities of the iPhone technology. The principles behind his work suddenly became clearer. Here was a

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plethora of missed opportunities on my part resolved in one simple request. A selfie close-up with an iPhone unlocked all my prior hesitations and self-imposed prohibitions so that I could respond with multiple photos sent one after the other over the internet. Moreover, the uncanniness of his project for my own situation came across from his latest email; not just a matter of birthdays and social distancing, but me in relation to myself, to my now essential cell phone, to a long-standing distaste of looking in the mirror, and to the artist’s desire for the art historian. Luca’s project transformed the usual dialectic between artist and she who would be portrayed by inserting an artefact of self-reflection into the transaction. Systems of change One self-portrait (selfie) and one painted portrait (after selfie) where art historian and artist address themselves and each other while questioning the idea that picture and self are one and the same. Taken together – as they must be when selfie serves as model – these images reveal that the self is not a unified, singular individual but that this portrait may be read as an imago, or a way of seeing the lack of unity in the person. To be addressing the self as selfie or to be portraying another through the given request of a selfie, is to address our mutual being in the world as art historian and artist. In the selfie the subject fragments into thousands of pixels, which Luca analogizes in his paintings through a thick, one might say ostentatious, impasto and a multiplicity of visible brushstrokes. Luca’s paintings after selfies reveal the heightened sig­ nificance of temporality in his project, their acute sensitivity to our present moment of extreme contingency and self-reflection. In so doing they also allow us to see something about the history of portraiture, emphasized through the dialogues on the paintings in the genre that his art historian subjects have undertaken over the course of their long scholarly lives, and again here. In the history of visual culture, the selfie comes after the Anthropocene, the era where man positioned himself at the centre of the world at the dawn of the age of Capital. Coming after the selfie, Luca’s paintings mark a new kind of portraiture for the present. This aspect of their temporality, related as it is to their material belatedness in terms of a specific (digital) photographic medium, contributes to the uncanniness

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of the overall Ocular Mentality project. In this sense, Luca’s portraits show us that which we know must have been there all along, but which we were too insensitive to see. First, like Luca’s paintings, the selfie compresses the image of a person into the foreground and the space of the viewer, insisting on the contiguity of representation and viewing, both in photography and painting. In phenomenological terms, the spectacularization of the image brought about through the dominant close-up constantly threatens to overwhelm the viewer’s sense of the human scale of the subject shown. This sense of the figure as spectacularized may be said to be reciprocal between viewer and image because it adheres to the subject’s own experience of imbalance in the taking of the selfie. All photographic and filmic close-ups tend to negate an anchoring in space, as Cindy Sherman’s œuvre has consistently demonstrated. In addition, because the simultaneous actions of looking at the self-image and taking the selfie with a hand-held device cause a certain visual vertigo, the actual visualization of non-conscious proprioception occurs. That is, the innate action of righting the tilt of the body through the placement of the head and eyes comes through in the image of the figure represented. The scale and placement of the figures together with the lack of depth of field between them and the background confound our expectations of the figure/ground relationship seen in earlier painted portraits. Del Baldo’s portraits and their specific (digital) source transfer meaning to each other reciprocally, using the visual and haptic senses of the subject and the artist. These digitally derived aspects of Del Baldo’s pictures – referencing as they do the apparatus’s haptic qualities of image-making – work together with the effects of impastoed brushwork, which I have already analogized to their digital source. Del Baldo further emphasizes our awareness of this conceptual situation through the commissioned essays that accompany the volume. The painted portraits have thus gained the characteristic features of a “pair,” in the meaning given by Husserl: as “an apperception of each according to the sense of the other.”1 Timeliness Turning to Del Baldo’s portraits with an understanding of the selfie source in mind, I need to account for their placement in an unrecognized present to which we have become sensitized by virtue of his paint-

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ings. Since its beginnings, photography has been said to compress historical time through the relationship established between figure and setting, character and scene. In this it differs, with the important exception of portraiture, from its major pictorial competitor in the realm of visual practices of representation, painting. The mise en scène of the earliest photographs from the nineteenth century refer us to an actual place frozen in time, while the blurred figures denote the fleeting moment of their capture. So too, the desert backdrops of early Westerns freeze an exact terrain in which groups of men on horseback or stagecoaches are obscured in their passing by clouds of dust, whose forms indicate direction and speed in direct contrast to the stillness of the landscape. The setting in the traditional photographic image establishes the sense of timelessness necessary for the narrative or action of the figures represented to appear as present. But what of the given exception to this historical account; the painted portrait and its successor, the photographic portrait? A telegraphic account of the history of portraiture will have to suffice for my interpretation here. Painted portraits were part of a system of portraiture that referred to the increasing economic and social privileges of a rising middle class in the early modern-modern eras and to the centrality of a (composed) picture of the individual in that world. Early photographic portraits ­followed and underscored the same requirements of the genre.2 Journalistic and ethnographic images of persons intervened in this history around the middle of the twentieth century, before and during World War II. These photographs were marked by a pervasive internationalism reliant on distinguishing subjects according to national and ethnic identities. By the early 1970s, “the family of man” story had become ubiquitous through the photographic medium, revealing the transition from internationalism to globalism; “from a world in which power is brokered by politics to one in which finance is the preferred medium of influence.”3 Selfies reveal the contingency and inadequacy of this perspective for the current situation of the world: one can never be entirely composed; painting turns to (digital) photography in order to underline the effects of portrayal in both media. The artist turns to the art historian to reflect upon the picture. The series of paintings in The Visionary Academy of Ocular Mentality present paintings that reflect photography back upon itself, just as the sub-

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jects who have written about their portraits reflect upon themselves as interpreters of art in light of the interconnected histories of portraiture and photography the pictures present. A certain disequilibrium – brought about through the artist’s rigorous conceptual program – may be noted in these art historical reflections. A profound instability between my persona and my situation in the picture, which I have labeled uncanny prevails. This feeling, a certain kind of provocation for a scholar of the history of art and visual culture, has required me to rethink the significance of portraiture in the world today, including its possible ideological significance regarding the portrayal of the subject under threat. The vicissitudes of life to which we have all been over-exposed by the Coronavirus have established themselves in the media and technologies of the present, from which the vicissitudes of art cannot escape. The portrait of me by Luca Del Baldo gives the lie to resemblances achieved in the past through methods no longer viable in this present world. In retrospect, and in response to Del Baldo, I understand that the title’s words visionary and mentality call out for uncanny apperceptions. Coda: The Email Exchange to Come But Catherine, it is not a picture from a selfie after all! But Luca, I am an art historian who sees it that way. 2020

1  Edmund Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic , quoted in Daniel Birnbaum, The Hospitality of Presence: Problems of Otherness in Husserl’s Phenomenology (Berlin and New York: Sternberg Press, 2008), 59. 2  I am indebted here as always to the work of Gisèle Freund, Photography and Society (Boston: D. R. Godine, 1980). 3  Stan Douglas, Journey into Fear (London: Koenig Books and Serpentine Gallery, 2002), 5. For further elaboration of this history and the relationship of the image to it, see also Journey into Fear (2002), Single-channel 16 mm. with 5 recombinant sound tracks, dubbed into English, French, Turkish, Brazilian, Portuguese, Korean, Mandarin and Arabic, and associated C-prints (2001), by Stan Douglas.

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Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

The photograph from which this portrait was created is so bland that my face now speaks to me, as the photo did not. I remember the photograph was taken in the streets in Stirling in Scotland. I was wearing the loveliest scarf, which I managed to lose on that trip. I am in an obscure way glad that the scarf has lost its special detail in the portrait. What does the artist’s eye notice? And why? Since I am not the one who initiated this portrait, it is hard for me to comment on it, especially since I am in India, not looking at it while I dictate this response. I have a peculiar resistance to making of me a plausible object. A little before his death, Edward W. Said told Tariq Ali that he should get a memoir out of me because my life had been interesting. Sixteen years have passed and I haven’t managed to put down a word! And yet, just a fortnight ago I was overwhelmed by a request from another well-known portraitist for having me as his object. I hope he will not ask me to write anything on what he produces. In the 70-s, Jim Lechay wanted to paint a picture of me wearing a blonde wig. After five sittings, he destroyed it saying it was too strong for the canvas. I have no idea what he meant. So, I think I will remain as inartic­ ulate as I manage to have been in the presence of myself represented as I have always been. But thank you, Luca. 2019

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Barbara Maria Stafford What is Mine

Identity seems to have become what is currently appearing on your face. A major achievement of painted portraits, on the other hand, is the exposure of “character” – a rarely-invoked, perhaps quaint-sounding, term reminiscent of Lytton Strachey’s idiosyncratic “eminent Victorians.” What can this strong stamp or elusive personal signature – indicating that an individual is more than the symptom of society or culture – possibly mean today? When everything thinkable is available online or on social media: how to capture a mysterious something hovering at the outer edge of the visible? The gifted portrait painter uncovers a hidden place, the secrets of a lived life, the otherwise shrouded results of cumulative practice stamped with pigment into responsive flesh. This search for materializable character [for the subject’s ability to change, adapt, evolve over time] is, I believe, a search for the subject’s trueness. Imagine it as the probing attempt to locate that mysterious ineffable something barely holding multiple surface tensions together just below skin. Unlike the rapid-fire taker of selfies, who does not ask what is concealed on the far side of looks, the artist detects what has been consciously or unconsciously made not merely presented. In our era of instantaneous automatic reactions – driven by the unclarity of the meaning of “identity” – how apt to be reminded of the power of slow looking, the thoughtful judgment that comes from deliberation,

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from the gradual unveiling of the phenomenological fragments that constitute “you”. Perhaps as a result of the interchange and co-perception, a painting makes me feel responsible for my face, for its obstinate physicality. In contrast – both literally as well as metaphorically – a photograph lacks volume, an existential density, the enduring saliencies discovered by the artist’s voluntary attention and pointed out by a punctuating hand as well as by a chromatic touch. On receiving the portrait, I confessed to Luca how comforting I felt the pastose gray strokes to be that shadowed my dress – as if a friend’s hand were gently placed on my shoulder. Instead of snapping an infinite series of impulses, the portrait painter brings forward for consideration a deeper presence, an extension of our self-conceptualizion breaking out from beneath the flow of disguises. When the subject is obliged to stand or sit still, it’s amazing the tangible character that emerges to confront and challenge how we have lived our life. So I thank Luca Del Baldo for showing me what is mine. 2019

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George Steiner

Dear Luca: I’m delighted and honoured. It is a really wonderful likeness, extra­or­ dinary as you did it from photographs. Thank you so very, very much. George 2016

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David Summers

What exactly is a portrait? I sometimes begin to think about such questions with etymologies, which present themselves as true, original meanings, but which most often serve the better purpose of raising more questions than they answer. The word “portrait”, which appears late in European languages, is from the Latin pro and trahere, the two together meaning “to draw forth”. The word “draw” in the sense of making “drawings”, is also from trahere, but the Latin has nothing to do with making images, and has more to do with such activities as drawing water, drawing breath, or drawing conclusions. The Italian ritrarre is also from the Latin trahere, and must mean something like “to draw forth again”, as if the subject had somehow been drawn forth from somewhere in the first place, and the painter was repeating that process, or recording its result. Into the world came a soul named Lisa, who would be painted by Leonardo da Vinci. But just what did Leonardo “draw forth” in his portrait? And how could the metaphor of “drawing forth” settle into modern languages as a satisfactory characterization of “taking the likeness” of an individual? Luca’s paintings are made from photographs provided by their subject. I offered a selection. The first photograph I sent was taken by my wife Nancy with her smart phone. As might be hoped, it was a sympathetic snapshot, but the resolution was too low. The second batch was taken by our daughter’s husband, Mark Whittle, a cosmologist, who works on the Big Bang. He had a new, better camera, and, as a student of photo­

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graphy, he thinks at once in terms of such things as lighting, contrast and composition. At this point, art – including the conventions of portraiture – enters the picture. Mark’s four or five photographs, like my wife’s, were all sympathetic, but the choice of the image to be painted was made by Luca. We have never met, and perhaps one of the photos looked to him like the fellow he imagined as he read the work that earned me an invitation to his project. I am glad he chose the one he did. I like to look like that, benign, not too certain. I am in the habit of thinking of what happened in the past to make possible what might happen in the present. In very general terms, to “take” a photograph is to seize and fix an instantaneous bundle of light. The photographer chooses what to photograph, but, as the word “photography” itself tells us, the light does the drawing. That bundle of light will never happen again, and is only removed from the incessant flow of time, or takes another place in the flow of time, in the photograph itself, which can also never happen again, and may last indefinitely, but not forever. What does it mean to paint a photograph, or to make a portrait from a photograph? A photograph is instantaneous, but the possibility of taking photographs stands at the end of the long, slow history of Mediterranean optics. Euclid understood that the act of vision could be described geometrically, and some 800 years later, Alhazen (as his Latin translators called him) understood all points on illuminated surfaces to be reflected in non-interfering straight lines, and, joining these realizations, made it possible to explain how our individual “points of view” are possible in the great dazzle of universal light in which we live our lives. As might be expected, Alhazen experimented with the camera obscura, the dark room that gives the modern camera its name. Rays of light pass through a small opening, crossing to create an image that is exactly point-forpoint, but inverted and reversed. A glass lens (from the Latin word for lentil), a bead of polished glass, might be placed at the opening, refracting and focusing the rays of light. This new optical formula was quick to yield eyeglasses (14th century) painter’s perspective (15th century) and at the beginning of the 17th century Johannes Kepler identified the retina at the back of the eye as the “painting”, as he called it, where the rays of light admitted to the eyes register. Descartes thought that vision must actually take place in the brain.

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It is safe to say that there are no portraits based on the exact transfer of infinitesimal points of light I have just described. There are, however, countless images of people, many of which are called portraits. Most of these, however, are to one extent or another images of status. It is as important that an image of the pharaoh, emperor, or pope represent the office of the person depicted as it is that it precisely resemble the individual holding that office. Many portraits must be labeled in order to make their individual identity clear, and portraits regarded as best are praised, not for their exact correspondence to appearance, but for the painter’s interpretation of the character of the sitter. Most of us are able to see well, but only some of us can portray others. At least that was true before photography, which made it possible to make images running the gamut from mug shots to portrait photography. Oil painting, like photography, was made a major art form in order to depict light. Portraiture in painting requires talent, skill, time and materials, and so portraits are usually relatively expensive. We may consider the encaustic Fayum portraits of Roman Egypt, which replaced the masks of the ancient mummy casket with deeply incongruous individual portraits, as if we looked through the expected conventional mask to see the dead we knew as living, now living in another world. Those portrayed were individuals of means, and often wear their best jewelry. They are portrayed in the Greek manner, with strong modeling and highlights, their faces turned three-quarters. Their eyes are open, making them alive, presumably to show that the person whose remains have been prepared for eternity in the casket behind them do in fact see the light of the next life. Few of these soulful visages are shown full-face, and those that are are often connected with the “Eastern” styles that would supplant the classical tradition. In my full-face portrait, the tonality is high against a dark but rich background with slight suggestions of textiles or architectural forms. The high-resolution photograph has served as a reliable guide for Luca’s eye and hand, like a GPS, detailing such slight but poignant asymmetries as the shapes of my eyes, ears, or skull. I brighten in four crusty stages, beginning from the touch of the canvas itself. As a layer of paint dries another is superimposed, creating the energy in virtual space and light of something forming, something coming together around a center or core, with increasing comprehension of that center or core. As paint

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becomes light it becomes texture atop and around this virtual spatial event. This texture-light does not simply describe or express, rather it seems to seek to join the light in which the painting itself stands. The light in my eyes, reflecting the light of my home living room in which the photograph was taken, becomes in the painting the light in which the viewer stands. My gaze is level and steady as I see that space and that viewer. As I smile slightly my eyebrows rise slightly, my face cracks slightly and comes to life. We are born with creases in our hands, which some believe foreshadow our character and fate, but creases in our faces appear as our life becomes the irreversible unfolding of our fate. These creases and wrinkles, if not caused by cares and joys, come together with cares and joys. This might be the trace of seeing the girl I would love and marry, or the birth of our children, or the death of parents, the arrival, departure, or loss of a friend, sickness and recovery, another spring, with more to come until the image is done. 2019

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Gregory L. Ulmer

The person (persona, mask) represented in the portrait by Luca Del Baldo, entitled “Gregory Ulmer,” is not unfamiliar to me. I am like Argos, the faithful dog who alone recognized his master, Odysseus, upon the latter’s return to Ithaca after twenty years. I cannot help but wag in recognition. Or maybe it is the other way around: I am Odysseus, who asks about the dog: “Eumaeus, what a noble hound that is over on the manure heap!” Aphanisis may be in play, some force that, in making “Ulmer” conceivable, thinkable, communicable, alienates him, such that he fades behind his signifier? It is not for me to say who that is. Luca noticed something in the source photograph, augmented it, focused and refined it, into something uncanny, in the original sense: something that should have remained hidden has been made to appear. What is that expression? Is it Ulmer’s teaching face? The photograph was taken as part of an interview for the student newspaper, “meet the faculty,” which no doubt serves a purpose at a university with fifty thousand students. The expression is composed from within, certainly, drawing upon the experience of physiology, the psychosomatic (soul body) correspondence, through which the gesture of smiling is the cause (not the result) of a sense of well-being. Physiognomy can be a false friend. What is the gesture of thought? Gary Cooper, the Stanislavskians said approvingly, could look like he was thinking, without actually doing so, which is all that mattered to the camera. When he glanced off-screen

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you wanted to go over there. If there is any content to Ulmer’s regard, it is just dialogue itself, an open channel, language available, tradition as such, ready for interrogation (questions welcome), transmission of transmissibility, exchange across generations as a formal possibility. Yet there are so few questions posed. If there is little semantic content in that look, there is nonetheless a feeling, underlying several emotions at least, emotions that rise up to fill the zone between the mask and the voids inside and out. We are outside conceptual territory now, stirring up inchoate intuitions, owning up to what Luca saw. Circumspection is required, and the famous Kuleshov experiment offers an approach, shot reverse shot, editing between Ulmer’s countenance and a particular scene that he seems to contemplate. This scene intimates the feeling, expressed in Ulmer’s reaction, so we understand the air, the atmosphere, the aura. Perhaps it is not an air at all, but one of the other elements, something wetter, colder, to speak of temperament? Photographers know the experience well, being on the lookout in the outer scene for equivalents (as Stieglitz called them), a blind woman, an injured animal, a rainy street, that return the gaze of recognition. Articulating an expression has something in common with wine tasting, at least when it comes to communicating the experience. A vocabulary accumulates around certain figures and analogies, in a poetry of syn­ esthesia, invoking oak, pine, blackberries, mushrooms. What Ulmer regards has something to do with roses, rose petals to be exact, starting with what we know about the flower, but more importantly, how the rose made itself indispensable to humanity, to the rituals, observances, commemorations by which an action becomes significant, or a condition finds its gesture. A negative example might help to set the range of measure. When the shot cuts to what Ulmer sees it will not be Cleopatra’s bedroom, prepared for the first visit of Mark Antony. The room was filled to a depth of nearly two feet with rose petals, petals of the Egyptian (Cabbage) rose. It is part of a tragedy, far too grand, too world historical, too Shakespearean. That is not it. No, what Ulmer regards is in the genre of a scene encountered recently, on a family vacation at a resort near Palm Coast, Florida. Three generations gathered, with water slides for the grandchildren trumping other considerations in choice of destination. During dinner, seated near a

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large window, they glimpsed a wedding in progress on the lawn near the beach (a common sight at this resort, according to the server). After dinner, taking a walk at twilight, the moon already up, a paper plate discarded over the palm tops, their path traversed the ceremonial grounds where a crew was at work sweeping bushels of rose petals into lawn and leaf trash bags. So many petals strewn along the path leading to the altar! It is the rose petals at just this moment of aftermath that Ulmer contemplates. The Japanese have codified a similar experience in the composite phrase wabi-sabi, to name that condition of fading radiance, not the glorious peak of astonishment, but afterwards, in decline, when blooms fall, collapse, and become litter. The couple retired to their suite long since, and probably care less about Antony and Cleopatra, or Odysseus and Penelope, although Ulmer would be glad to explain. The guests are otherwise engaged at the open bar, happy to admit it all has something to do with love, or a capacity to be affected in some way. There is music long into the evening, and who would complain if a few extra guests joined the festivities. The music playing behind the prosopon is not what the DJ ordered, but something Argentine, or in that style, it could be New Orleans, accordion in a minor key, rarely heard before midnight. 2014

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Victor J. Vitanza

/\/\/\ I open this brief discussion that I take to be a remembrance of other lengthy discussions starting, say, July 13, 2012, and continuing through April 19, 2014. These discussions over this period of time led, as best as I can presume, to Luca Del Baldo’s making – brush stroke by brush stroke, layer by layer – a painting, leading to other paintings; not other re-paintings, but other paintings. Of supposedly VjV, me, or some more of me. The various joyful versions of the paintings become, as best as I can see, accountable to One, Two, Three Spells U B E R T Y. As Tom Sebeok might count. But how to get to uberty? Gerhard Richter says: “When I paint from a photograph, conscious thinking is eliminated. I don’t know what I am doing. My work is far closer to the Informal than to any kind of ‘realism’. The photograph has an abstraction of its own, which is not easy to see through” (29). Luca Del Baldo says: “I believe that Richter’s thought is not entirely true, his work is primarily conceptual with no aesthetic pretensions. For me, the subject is inseparable from practice and research in painting, the formal solutions, new ways for each work. The zoom of a detail offers a kind of reality ‘expanded’ very interesting for freedom of expression. Hyper-realism takes advantage of this solution in the scrupulous technique and obsessive and boring description of an object (when, I think, the great art is synthesis), but for me the referent is always important

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in the vision and the meaning of artwork, I don’t take the photograph only as a ‘pattern’ of signs or color effects to arrive at a decorativism end in itself. Then, the discourse on ‘realism’ is just a ‘chimera.’ There are several recordings, both mechanical and manual, and the reality remains elusive in its complexity” (in an email to VjV). /\/\/\ But what does it mean to be photographed? What does it mean to be painted? What, even more, or less, so, does it mean to be painted from a photograph? I have no idea of my own! In practice or theory that matters. Hardly, does it mean: Losing our souls through the workings of art in the age of mechanical reproduction (Benjamin)! I don’t think so! After all has been read and unread to reread, I am still moving toward the varied works of Roland Barthes’ Punctum (Camera Lucida) and his Obtuse Sense (“The Third [Sense]”), and John Water’s Director’s Cut, and Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills. After all, they in their own ways are having and making fun with their unorthodox approaches. /\/\/\ This adventure of remembrances began over a year ago when Luca and I started talking online. He, in Como, Italy; me, in Clemson, SC. Some where in between. Among the many topics, we discussed the differences between Italy and Sicily. Then, film, as made in Sicily. I favored Giuseppe Tornatore (The Star Maker); Luca favored Francesco Rosi and Vittorio De Seta’s documentaries (Salvatore Giuliano). I spoke of my plans to shoot a film in Sicily (Etna) as well as in Turkey (Ephesus). And I shared my latest venture: namely, that I was establishing my own film production company: St. Vitus Pictures. Luca’s response: “Ah! Ah! St. Vitus philosopher!!!!” /\/\/\ Additionally, we discussed the European Graduate School in SaasFee Switzerland, where I offer a seminar on Jean-François Lyotard in June each year, and where Jean-Luc Nancy and Sylvère Lotringer also offer seminars along with still others. /\/\/\ Finally, Luca asked for a photograph of me that he might paint from. I finally sent him a photograph to which he responded: “I like the ‘Lyotard look,’ above all for the earring and a bit religious posture of your head. I could paint from it.” /\/\/\ In a month or so, the several versions of paintings became a final version. Hence, Luca sent the painting to me. After discussing the matter with my wife, it now hangs on the walk-way of our third floor,

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over-looking our second floor, which in the front of the house is our main entrance. When entering, visitors cannot but see the painting. If I open the door to greet them, they see me in the flesh. And then, see me. Many layered. Repeated several times. /\/\/\ I have spent various times inspecting the painting. Though it is the final version, there is no doubt that there are many Victors in the painting. Studying it, we think of Leonardo da Vinci, writing of the visual miracle know as pareidolia. Remember Hamlet : “Do you see that cloud up there that looks like a camel?” (act 3, scene 2). Well, Leonardo explains: “if you look at any wall spotted with various stains or with a mixture of different kinds of stones, if you are about to invent some scene you will be able to see in it a resemblance to various different landscapes adorned with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, plains, wide valleys, and various groups of hills. You will also be able to see diverse combats and figures in quick movement, and strange expressions of faces, and outlandish costumes, and an infinite number of things which you can then reduce into separate and well conceived forms” (173). Friends and guests enter our house and, no matter how many times they have entered our house, they look at me and then turn to Luca’s painting of me: “Do you see that painting up there that looks like the victor.” All across my faces. /\/\/\ In Luca’s painting, there is no single face. Quite the opposite: ­layers besides layers of faces. Topologically arranged, yet obsessively rearranging themselves. They signify Uberty. And yet, also Pleroma. That is the gift that the painting offers. Us all. 2014

Works Cited: Mccurdy, Edward. Leonardo da Vinci’s Notebooks: Arranged and Rendered into English . NY: Kent Press, 2007. Richter, Gerhard. Writings, Interviews, and Letters 1961 – 2007. Eds. Dietmar Elger and Hans-Ulrich Obrist. London: Thames and Hudson, 2009. Sebeok, Thomas A. “One, Two, Three Spells U B E R T Y.” The Sign of Three. Ed. Umberto Eco and Sebeok. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1983. 1-10.

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Kendall Walton On Painting from Photographs

Luca Del Baldo’s portrait is remarkable. He made an intriguing choice of a photograph to use (not to mention a face to depict). And he created an intense, compelling, vibrant depiction from it. Despite my admiration, however, the portrait makes me very uncomfortable, partly no doubt because it is of me, with its unsettling combination of strangeness and familiarity, but also because the guy in the portrait is too close for comfort, even when I stand well back from the canvas! That of course is part of what makes the painting so powerful. It is a wonderful work of art. I will display it somewhere, but not over my desk. I won’t have that guy, me, constantly breathing down my neck. Even Beethoven’s late string quartets, than which no greater music has been conceived, are also, sometimes, too much. *** Del Baldo’s use of photographs in creating his portraits invites attention to these two modes of picture making. Much has been written com­ paring them, exploring similarities and differences in the manners of their production, their makers’ objectives, the nature of the results, the ways in which viewers respond to them, the uses to which they are put. I merely mention, here, what I take to be the most fundamental and most important difference: To look at a photograph of a turtle or a philosopher is actually to see it; one sees the object, indirectly, by seeing its photographic representation. Looking at a painting, by contrast, one

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sees only the representation, not the turtle or philosopher. Photographs are “transparent” and paintings are not.1 This does not mean that one’s view of a turtle or philosopher, mediated by a photograph, is veridical. Often it is not. It is a mistake to suppose that photographs provide more reliable information about the world than paintings generally do just because they are photographs, or because of their “mechanical” origin. Whatever epistemological value either photographs or paintings possess depends on particular circumstances. Paintings made in a society with an obsession for accuracy or religious strictures against misrepresentation may be far more reliable witnesses to the world they depict than photographs made by cameras with flexible lenses or randomized settings. I and others sometimes fault works of art for being too “perfect,” or too contrived, for revealing too obviously and extensively the hand of the artist in their construction. We prefer, sometimes, a sense of accident or naturalness, a sense that not every detail was subject to the artist’s direct control, that some of them just happened. In other instances, however, these (different but related) flaws are not flaws at all. We prize a work’s perfection, admire the artist’s sensitivity and insight and skill in arranging every detail to best advantage, appreciate seeing her in her work, seeing what she cares about, perhaps empathizing with her or sharing her vision. The contrast between approximations of these two aesthetic attitudes is a central element of Heinrich Wölfflin’s account of the differences between painting in the classic and baroque periods. He points out that Rembrandt, in contrast to earlier artists, aims for a “semblance of hazard” in a composition, and Rubens avoids an arrangement that “would look insufferably ‘sought for’,” opting for one that is “felt … as the natural thing.”2 Photographs can go either way, and they do. But photography is especially suited to satisfying the first objective: avoiding contrivance, obscuring the role of the photographer, giving an impression of accident, a “semblance of hazard.” Many photographs are, in part, accidental. The casual photographer points and shoots, and is surprised to find in the resulting picture a seagull flying overhead or a bizarre momentary smirk on a person’s face, perhaps even a fortuitous framing of the main subject by the branches of a tree or symmetries in the picture’s composition. (Either of the latter may be a bit of “perfection” without actual

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contrivance.) Such features in a painting are unlikely to surprise the painter, who deliberately, in full awareness, applied every individual brushstroke. If in his picture a seagull soars overhead, that is because he put it there. If a tree neatly frames the subject, that is probably not an accident. Paintings can nevertheless give an impression of accident. But there are limits. Impressions depend partly on what viewers know or believe about a picture’s likely actual genesis. Given our realization that painters control, individually, every detail of their canvases, a striking violation of symmetry or an angle of view that partially obscures rather than frames the subject may seem deliberately designed to give an impression of accident, contrived to avoid the appearance of contrivance. Viewers of a photograph, a casual snapshot especially, are less likely to have this impression, aware as they are of how easily one can make photographs without choosing or controlling or even foreseeing many of its details. What about pictures created by a combination of painting and photographic processes? In addition to composites and touched up photographs, there are photographs of paintings – which may depict either the paintings or what the paintings depict, or both. And there are paintings from, based on, photographs, like Luca Del Baldo’s portraits. The latter category is enormously varied. (Think also of Chuck Close, and Vermeer who purportedly used not photographs but camera obscura images.) Painters use photographs in various ways. They may trace a photograph, or copy it, or just stand back taking in the photographed scene and rendering it in paint, without attending to the marks on the photographic surface, i.e. they may paint “from life,” from indirectly perceived life (however drastically their view is guided or distorted by the photograph). Del Baldo’s technique was largely the latter, I am sure; zooming in we see brushstrokes, nothing like the pixels of the digitized photograph he worked from. A photograph of a painting of a frog is transparent to the painting but not to the frog. We see the painting “through it” (i.e. indirectly), but not the frog, no matter which it is understood to depict. Paintings based on photographs, like Del Baldo’s portraits, are not transparent at all. Like other painters, those working from photographs ordinarily control nearly every detail of their canvases, deliberately execute every brushstroke. Some of the brushstrokes might serve to avoid certain obvious

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contrivances, spoiling symmetries or avoiding neat framing. But they themselves are likely not to be contrived, not transparently calculated to promote an artificial sense of accident. The viewer’s impression may be that the artist merely followed the lead of the photograph, without necessarily even noticing important features of the results. A violation of symmetry, for instance, may seem to be as natural or accidental as it does in the photograph. Of course what either the photographer or the painter actually noticed or intended may not be what he or she seems to have noticed or intended. Both artists may have meant to give viewers a sense of accident and, because this intention is not apparent, succeeded in doing so. *** Luca Del Baldo carefully reproduced the intricate pattern of reflections in the right lens of my glasses. A painter working from directly perceived life, seeing me face to face over her easel, might well have omitted them, wanting not to detract from the face itself, not to clutter the image with presumed irrelevancies. Or she might have included the reflections, hoping to encourage the (perhaps false) impression she was not deliberately trying to focus attention exclusively on the face, but at the risk of making this objective all too evident. This is scarcely a risk for Del Baldo. One’s impression is that the reflections depicted in his portrait are simply carried over from the photograph. They inherit the casual naturalness of their predecessors in the photograph. I focus on these mostly indecipherable marks on Del Baldo’s canvas with some relief; they help me avoid making eye contact with myself. I will find a place of honor for the portrait, one where I won’t have to look at it much. 2013

1  I explain this in “Transparent Pictures,” in my Marvelous Images: On Values and the Arts (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). 2  Wölfflin, Heinrich. Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art (M. D. Hottinger, Trans.): Dover Publications, Inc. Originally published 1915. p. 134.

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Martin Warnke

Due to his prolonged illness, Martin Warnke was no longer able to write a text. Martin Warnke was born in Iuji (Brazil) on October 12, 1937, as the son of parents who emigrated in 1936. Having lived in Germany since his university studies, he became an intellectual authority with a widespread impact. While working as a professor of art history at the University of Hamburg from 1979 to 2003, he succeeded in redefining art history as a critical study of culture, which includes all subject areas relating to pictures up to the present and explores political iconology in particular. He can be thanked to a significant extent for the fact that it was possible to regain the building of the Warburg Library of the Cultural Sciences, which was forced to move to London in 1933, for the public life of Hamburg. He died in Halle an der Saale on December 11, 2019. Horst Bredekamp, 2020

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Peter Weibel

The history of portrait painting offers two different trends: One trend is the so called objective naturalist portrait. The painter steps back. The portrait offers only the observed subject, the characteristics, the traces of the painted subject. The painter is nearly invisible. Without a signature we would not know who painted the portrait. The other tendency is the opposite: The person disappears and the painter makes himself the subject of the portrait. His brush treatments, his selection of colour, his style becomes so predominant that you don’t see anymore whom he portrayed. One example would be van Gogh. You immediately recognize this is a portrait by van Gogh. But without the title of the portrait you would not know whom he portrayed. Luca Del Baldo found a new third way. He did not destroy the classical tradition of portrait painting, therefore you recognise very clearly the face of the portrayed person. But at the same time you also recognise very clearly that it is a painting by Luca Del Baldo, you recognise his method, his approach, his style. The person portrayed and the person making the portrait remain on the same level. Nobody dominates the other one. Therefore, Luca Del Baldo is the first democratic portrait painter. 2020

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Arthur K. Wheelock Jr.

Portraits teach us much about those who directly, or indirectly, have impacted our lives. Families everywhere treasure paintings, photographs, or silhouette cut-outs depicting relatives and ancestors whose names have been lost in the mists of time, because they provide visual connections to our roots and personal histories. Portraits of family members often spark memories, adding new dimensions to stories that are already important to the fabric of our lives. In the most fundamental sense, Luca Del Baldo is enriching the family heritage of everyone he invited to participate in his “collective” portrait series, for each of us will receive the painting he made on the basis of a photograph sent to him. In my case, the connections to family are many since my daughter-in-law, KK Ottesen, was the photographer, and I am standing in the courtyard of the National Gallery of Art, where I served as curator for 45 years. While portraits are of great interest for families, they also provide remarkable windows into worlds far beyond our own domestic spheres. We often turn to portraits to understand the distant past. When I think of ancient Egypt, for example, I not only reflect on the great pyramids, but also on the timeless images of pharaohs honed from black granite or other unyielding materials. I can trace my captivation with Egypt to my childhood when I first encountered the exotic face of Queen Nefertiti in my grandfather’s study, for a reproduction of the famed bust of

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the Egyptian queen sat on his large writing desk. Another portrait that played a role in connecting me to the past is Hans Holbein’s iconic portrayal of King Henry VIII. Henry’s power and might are unmistakable, both because of his elaborate wardrobe and the way his bulky mass fills the picture plane. Holbein’s image was never far from in my mind when studying English history or when reading Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall. How different is that perception of leadership from the one Kehinde Wiley created with a far more approachable portrait of Barack Obama, who sits quietly and reflectively against a backdrop of greenery and flowers. Artist self-portraits are another source of constant interest, for they offer insights into how their makers presented themselves to society. For example, Peter Paul Rubens never portrayed himself as a practicing artist. On the contrary, he showed himself as a debonair aristocrat comfortable with humanists and royalty, his primary patrons. Rubens, who always dressed appropriately for his high social status, invariably wore a wide-brimmed hat to hide his receding hairline. Without any reservation, he adhered to Renaissance ideals of proper decorum expressed by Baldassare Castiglione in his influential manual, The Book of the Courtier. A very different artist image emerges from Rembrandt’s many painted, drawn, and etched self-portraits. We see him in all aspects of his life, and in many guises. Rembrandt appears as a young aspiring artist in Leiden, then as a towering master in Amsterdam until, late in life, his body, if not his indominable spirit, began to weaken and fail. He showed himself as a beggar sitting on a mound of dung, a respectable burgher, an artist holding his brushes and palette, but also in costumes that evoked Renaissance scholars and exotic travelers from abroad. Rembrandt, however, never idealized his own features, and, over time, we see his bulbous nose widen and his jowly cheeks grow ever more distended. The one constant is his steady gaze, often heavy and not without sadness. In a number of self-portraits, Rembrandt left his eyes partially obscured in shadow, allowing us to find our own path into the window of his soul. In similar ways, the personas and personal histories of other artists become ever more understandable through their self-portraits, not least among them Vincent van Gogh. Portraits of thinkers whose ideas have helped shape the course of human history are also endlessly intriguing. Portrait series of important ancient philosophers, writers and artists often hung in the studies of

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Renaissance and Baroque humanists. Images of Aristotle, Plato and ­Socrates, imaginative or real, still spark our interest because they help ground the abstract ideas of these philosophers into physical realities to which we can all connect. The same can be said for Lucas Cranach’s depictions of the pugnacious Marten Luther, or Albrecht Dürer’s en­ graving of Erasmus thoughtfully writing at a desk in his study. Dürer’s engraving helped spread Erasmus’ fame throughout Europe, much as do photographs and videos of twentieth-century leaders and thinkers, such as Martin Luther King, Jr. We look at portraits because they help connect us with others, providing some sense of their physical appearance and psychological character, but we also enjoy portraits because they are often beautiful and compelling works of art. Many questions exist, however, about the art of portraiture, not least the nature of the relationship between artist and sitter. What message is being conveyed through pose, costume, pictorial setting, chiaroscuro effects, or degree of finish? How does an artist suggest the sitter’s inner life? What about a painting’s scale? What difference does it make if a portrait can be worn on a necklace, is displayed in a grand entrance hall, or published in a book? Does it matter if an artist paints or draws directly from a living model or from an intermediary image, such as an antique cameo, engraving or photograph, a pictorial source that nineteenth century artists, among them Thomas Sully and Thomas Eakins, began using after the invention of photography? Luca Del Baldo’s project – to publish a “collective” portrait of individuals involved in the arts, literature and philosophy, with accompanying ­written commentaries – raises a number of fascinating questions. Unlike traditional portrait series, Luca had little or no role in selecting the photographs. Hence, his distinctive manner of painting, not the figure’s pose or setting, is the visual link that connects these images. Although his portraits essentially remain true to the sitter’s appearance, faces appear somewhat craggier than in reality because of his distinctive manner of modeling with bold, unblended brush strokes. As befitting a portrait series featuring writers and thinkers, he emphasizes eyes, for they purportedly allow access to the sitter’s inner being. It should be noted, however, that Luca’s portraits are not the essence of the project, only its byproduct. The portraits will never be exhibited together as a group, as Luca is sending each sitter his or her portrait for their own

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private enjoyment. Luca’s “collective” portrait is a revolutionary concept that merges painting, photography, and written texts in ways that will yield fascinating insights into the nature of philosophical and art historical discourse in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries. 2019

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John Yau Portrait of My Portrait

I first saw a painting by Luca Del Baldo in the apartment of Barry Schwabsky and Carol Szymanski. They had recently moved back to New York from London where they had lived for many years. It was on the wall opposite of where I was seated for dinner. I think there were six or seven of us around a long table that night. There was lots of wine, delicious food, and high-spirited conversation. All through dinner, I found myself gazing at the painting, intrigued. It was a portrait of Barry, but it wasn’t by anybody I knew. Unlike most portraits, the painting showed Barry in profile, and though it was just the side of his head, it seemed that the artist had captured him on his way somewhere, in determined concentration. Shortly after the other guests had left, I asked Barry about the painting and learned about Luca Del Baldo and his project of paintings from photographs of people he respects but hasn’t met. The title of the project is The Visonary Academy of Ocular Mentality. You could say that Luca Del Baldo is the academy’s official portraitist. If he paints your portrait, then you have become a member. The title, I would later learn, came from Arthur C. Danto, whose portrait Luca had painted. Barry, who seems to know everybody, including many people that he has never met, suggested that I write to Luca via email. I think that is how we began. Of course, my memory of this event may be incorrect, but that seems to me to be what Luca’s project is also about. When Luca asked

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me if he could do my portrait, I hesitated. What photograph of me did I want to send him? I eventually sent a number of photographs. I chose ones that I neither liked nor disliked – mostly ones where I wasn’t looking at the camera. I picked photographs where my face nearly filled the photograph’s rectangle. I kept looking for some unexpected image of myself – and I don’t have that many photographs on hand. I don’t know exactly what I was looking for – I just knew what I didn’t want, a conventional pose, which is what first drew me to Barry’s portrait. I also knew that I didn’t want to have a view of me in profile, out of respect for Barry and the photograph that he sent to Luca. During our email exchange, I found out that Luca liked the writings of J. G. Ballard. This convinced me that everything would work out. So what do I see when I look at the painting. My hair is white. My brow is furrowed. I look to be in pain, or annoyed, maybe both. I know the photographs were taken in the fall of 2013, and Luca began working on the portrait at the beginning of 2014. In September 2014, after getting what I thought was a routine MRI, and was about to go teach, the doctor told that me that I had to go to the Emergency Room immediately. An aide helped me into a wheelchair and pushed me six blocks to the Emergency Room of the NYU Langone Hospital. After lots more testing, and admission as a patient, I learned that I had to get the first three cervical vertebrae – C 1, 2 and 3 – in my neck fused. They were pressing against my spine and the doctor was amazed that I was still walking. A few months later, after having recovered from this operation, I had my right knee replaced on February 27. Three months to the day, on May 27, I had my left knee replaced. When the photographs were taken, I was in constant pain and it had become increasingly difficult to walk. I wore braces on both legs and needed a cane. All that discomfort is simmering in the portrait that Luca Del Baldo was kind enough to send me. Whenever I look at the painting, it looks back at me across a divide of time marked by consultations, operations, X-rays, procedures, constant testing, lying on a gurney in different hallways on different floors waiting to be examined, sitting in a wheelchair, using a walker, learning to climb stairs, visiting home nurses, and physical therapy. I can scrutinize the man’s face in the painting, but he is looking elsewhere, and that is the way I wanted it, though I didn’t realize it at the

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time, not having any idea of what lay ahead. Sometimes I think I know what he’s thinking, but then I realize I don’t. I see a person I once resembled but don’t really know, at least in this version of him. That’s one reason why I haven’t stopped looking at it. 2016

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Semir Zeki Sketch for a Portrait of Portraits

In the days before photography, portrait painting was commonly used to acquaint one’s friends and family, and most especially a possible future spouse, with what one looked like. Portraits were therefore frequently used when the wealthy were negotiating a possible marriage. Politically, the cult of personality relies significantly on disseminating caring and avuncular pictures of powerful men and women, almost always in a flattering light; these photographic portraits often become iconic weapons, to be used in sustaining the powerful in power. Enduring examples are to be found in the iconic portraits of Lenin, Stalin, Che Guevara, and Eva Peron, among many others. Yet, if the purpose of portraits is simply to acquaint others of what one looks like, or to act as a constant reminder to vulnerable crowds of where political power lies, portraits would soon outlive their usefulness, once the person portrayed departs the scene or power changes hands. But portraits, or rather good ones, are enduring; they have a longevity far surpassing those they portray and a long-term value that is very nearly totally independent of the identity of the person being portrayed. Michelangelo was right when, reproved because his sculptures of members of the (then) powerful Medici family bore no resemblance to the actual members of that family, replied, “In a thousand years’ time, who

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will remember what the Medicis looked like?”, implying with his usual but justified arrogance that his sculptures will far outlive members of the Medici family, which, unsurprisingly, is what happened. On the other hand, lesser known, or indeed totally unknown, mortals have been propelled to fame, and sometimes lasting fame, because of their portraits. There are many good examples; one that I like is Velaz­ quez’s portrait of his mulatto assistant Juan de Pareja, which Britain disgracefully allowed to be exported to the Metropolitan Museum in New York in the early 1970s. To the general public, he is virtually un­ known; he is little known even among artists, in spite of the fact that a painting of his, La vocación de San Mateo, hangs in the Prado Museum in Madrid. It is Velazquez’s portrait of him, and that alone, that has made Juan de Pareja famous. Why should this be so? Velazquez’s masterly portrait of Juan de Pareja conveys a character more powerfully than volumes of detailed written explanation could do. No wonder that, when first exhibited in Rome in the 1660s, it “received such universal acclaim that, in the opinion of all the painters of different nations, everything else seemed like painting but this alone like truth”. I say “a character” rather than “the character”, because the value of this painting lies significantly in the perception that it is characteristic of a certain personality and could thus be a por­ trayal of many individuals who share that personality and character. Its validity as a portrait stretches well beyond de Pareja; indeed, it is not a portrait but a portrayal. This is characteristic of many great portraits, when the person portrayed, whether famous or humble, whether known or unknown, becomes irrelevant because the character portrayed alone becomes dominant. Every part of this magnificent portrait is executed with masterly strokes but the part that arrests is the face, even in spite of the fact that it is not the largest, most luminous or brightest part of the portrait. That the face comes to dominate a painting is made even more obvious in the youthful Rembrandt’s self-portrait in which the face, apart from the right cheek, is almost completely obscured; yet even through that obscurity, the portrait manages to convey the expression on the face. Why should this be so is a question that is interesting to consider from a neurobiological point of view.

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One of the most fundamental functions of the brain is to acquire knowledge about the world and it has to do so against the constantly changing signals that reach it from surfaces and objects. To obtain constant knowledge in a world where the information reaching the brain is never constant from moment to moment, the brain must strive to stabilize the world. This it does by searching for essentials or constants, with varying degrees of success. I believe that the portrait artist also searches for constants – and specifically for constants of character. Faces carry a great deal of information – about the object itself (namely that it is a face), the identity of the face, its age, race, psychological disposition at any given moment, the character behind the face and much else besides. It is therefore not surprising that faces should have a very privileged position in terms of representation in the brain, with three and possibly more areas devoted to the perception of faces. Between them, these areas register many of the details of a face outlined above. They are moreover able, in ways that remain still to be clarified in precise neurobiological terms, to stabilize a face. For example, we are able to classify a face as belonging to a particular person regardless of the angle or distance from which we view it, the lighting conditions in which it is viewed, or whether it is happy or sad. Through this stabilization there results a certain constancy to faces; this constancy is the result of a brain operation, the precise details of which remain unknown. Between them, the areas of the brain that are critical for the perception of faces appear to register every departure from what one presumes is an inherited brain template of what a normal face should look like, if it is to be registered as a normal face. Such is the prominence of normal face representation in the brain that the British painter, Francis Bacon, who had the avowed aim of giving “a visual shock”, usually managed to give that “shock” by traducing and mutilating faces (and bodies) on his canvases though he rarely did the same for objects. Physiological experiments show that even slight adjustments of the face, for example a misalignment of the two halves of the face (which is trivial compared to what Bacon did in his paintings) leads to a significant change in the electrical signals from the brain in response to the viewing of faces. Bacon’s choice, of mutilating faces and bodies to deliver his “visual shock”, should therefore not be surprising. We are born with an inherited or very rapidly acquired template of what normal faces and bodies

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should look like but we do not have equivalent templates for what objects should look like; indeed it is difficult to decide whether there is such a thing as a “normal” object, except that which we become accustomed to through experience. Instead, knowledge of objects is acquired at various stages after birth and is modified throughout life. Judging by the appraisal of his work given by ordinary people as well as art critics, Bacon succeeded admirably in his aim, because he traduced a template that we are born with. Perceptual experiments suggest that the brain also appears to have a template for recognizing that a certain pattern of muscular contractions is expressive of a certain state of mind, for example of happiness or sadness. Although it has been the subject of much debate, the current consensus is that this is also a pancultural attribute, in that the same expression is conveyed by the same pattern of muscular contraction in different races and cultures; one can therefore communicate, acquire and impart knowledge to people of diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds by using the same muscles, contracted in a similar way, to convey the same emotions. How the brain achieves such feats is not really well understood in terms of specific and detailed neural mechanisms. Even less understood in neurobiological terms is the depiction of character; indeed the question itself has not been posed. Do we have a brain template that specifies a character which the artist taps into when painting and the viewer uses when perceiving? This is not such an outrageous suggestion. After all, the character of Juan de Pareja is universally recognisable by those of different cultures and backgrounds, thus implying that whatever the neurological mechanisms that signify a given character to a given viewer, they must be common to all humans. If neurobiology has not even started to address this issue, artists have done so with relative ease for centuries. Artists, in many ways, are neurobiologists without realising it, as I argued many years ago; they achieve their effects by experimenting but with methods unique to them. In portraying a person’s character through their face, artists also stabilize the image they convey by discarding a lot of information and choosing from that only those non-changing, constant, characteristics that will be useful in depicting character. What are the features that they choose to depict and portray a character? No one knows; artists

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themselves don’t really know, except that they achieve the desired effect through experimentation on canvas – the desired effect being one that satisfies them and which, they presume, will satisfy other brains as well since they make, implicitly and unconsciously, the reasonable assumption that other brains will perceive the same significant features in their portrait as they themselves do. What are the attributes and features that Velazquez chose to depict the character of Juan de Pareja and others who share the same character? He hasn’t told us and nor has anyone else. But we all know what character it is when we see his painting. Nor has Luca Del Baldo told us what features he chose in portraying my character. In a way, he does not need to; his portrait says it all. Hence, the very same questions asked above may be asked here of my portrait by Luca Del Baldo. It is instructive to compare his portrait of me to my photographic portrait by the Polish photographer Bartosz Siedlik. Superficially, they are alike, yet it does not take much effort or imagination to realise that they are significantly different. I will not enumerate the differences here but leave to the viewer to do so. What is interesting is that both portraits convey a character, and both the photographer and the painter require considerable skill to do so. Time-wise, that skill is different for the two: the photographer has to capture a moment in time when the appearance of his subject conveys to the photographer, even if momentarily, the subject’s character. That is no a trivial skill and requires a relatively rapid decision. For the painter, the task is no less extraordinary and requires no less skill, even if there is not such a time constraint. Perhaps the painter can work and re-work the portrait, adding an inflection here, a subtle shading there, the slight elongation of a feature elsewhere, all of which contribute to the final product. The difference between two is that the painter has not only to capture the character but to paint it as well. Is there an objective way of identifying what, pictorially, constitutes, character? Art historians believe that there sometimes is. It is said, for example, that portraying someone looking at us with the eyes alone, the head being turned away, was a Venetian habit of conveying haughtiness and disdain, Titian’s portrait of Geralomo Barbarigo at the National Gallery in London being an example (some consider it to be a self portrait by Titian). Does it depend on one feature, or more; or perhaps does it

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depend upon several features brought together in a special way, to which the artist alone holds the secret. Can Luca Del Baldo himself tell us, or is it an unconscious process the key to which lies in an artist’s talent, of which he himself is not even aware? As a neurobiologist, I find it interesting to ask what features or combination of features are required to depict a character. Is it determined by the neurobiological processes in a single cortical area or in the several areas that are critical for the perception of faces? Does it require the collaboration of visual and non-visual brain areas? At present, the artist alone knows that, but unconsciously. And his answer lies in the portrait alone. Hence my belief, articulated many times before, that the neurobiologist has a great deal to learn from the artist in studying the organization of the brain, by studying the products of artists. In this instance the question raised, but not asked experimentally before, is: what are the features and the underlying neural processes that depict character in a face? Oscar Wilde probably knew more about the brain instinctively than many others. To have said, as he did, that, “It is in the brain that the poppy is red, that the apple is odorous, that the skylark sings” implies a profound understanding of what the brain does, an understanding that far surpasses what most thought about the brain’s capacities at the time he wrote, and for many years afterwards. His insight went further. It is quite extraordinary to fuse images in the way the Velazquez did, or that Luca Del Baldo does here, in order to give a real life impression of what a certain character will look like in a single, unique, portrait. This is one reason why we value not only portraits but art in general. As Oscar Wilde put it in his letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, “I treated Art as the supreme reality and life as a mere mode of fiction”. I shall for long study Luca Del Baldo’s portrait carefully to learn what it says about me and to gain insights from that into the possible neurobiological mechanisms involved. 2019

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Slavoj Zizek

In his lessons on aesthetics, Hegel wrote that a good portrait resembles the person it portrays more than this person resembles itself – it distills the inner truth of a person covered up by his or her accidental features. This, exactly, is what I felt when I first saw Luca Del Baldo’s oil portrait of myself: all the inner despairs and doubts lurking in me are there open to see. It is not a flattering portrait, but it is “me” much more than my photos. It is a “me” that I often do not like, but nonetheless a “me” that I am. 2018

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“Conversation Piece” Luca Del Baldo & Andreas Beyer

Caro Luca, tu citi, sul tuo sito internet, la constatazione di Clement Greenberg, che oggigiorno sia impossibile di dipingere una faccia, e la risposta di De Kooning che, pur condividendo, aggiunge anche che è allo stesso tempo impossibile non farlo. ln che senso tu diresti, che il tuo progetto è l’affermazione di questa contraddizione?

Nonostante il discredito teorico di taluni storici dell’arte, critici o filosofi contro la faccia (e nello specifico, il ritratto) nelle arti visive, io credo, al contrario, che oggi essa abbia un ruolo cruciale. Qualcuno ha scritto che la nostra è una “società facciale”, banalmente si potrebbe citare la pletora di selfies che viene postata ogni giorno sul web o al fenomeno Facebook, ma io andrei oltre all’aspetto di questa specie di nevrosi o psico-patologia collettiva e ritornerei alla tua citazione. Come tu ben sai, “Clem” Greenberg era contro il “soggetto/contenuto” nella pittura che era schiava della letteratura e della narrazione, battagliando per la sublime forma aniconica (in Pollock, per esempio) che liberava il linguaggio artistico dai suoi limiti. Ora, non poteva che prendersela con la “faccia”, con il ritratto, dove per secoli l’arte figurativa ha prodotto capolavori di tale potenza “medusea”, di forze centripete e centrifughe dello sguardo, di incantamento, di indagine sull’umano, di documento storico, etc. Quando penso alle “women” di De Kooning, mi pietrificano gli occhi dei suoi “volti medusei” e le fauci/vagine dentate disartri­che, vedo anche in quei dipinti la materia consustanziale della pittura fatta

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di ferite, tagli, suture, brandelli, pustole, carne, terre, pigmento, olio di lino, trementina, colpi di pennello, spatolate … come nell’opera dell’altro grande olandese, Rembrandt Van Rijn. Il mio interesse precipuo è l’uomo, e la testa ne è il centro … dove l’immagine brucia, dove la pittura vive della propria materia … Chiaro, Greenberg forse ha avuto forse una visione un po’ troppo “naturalistica” della letteratura (la narrazione può essere letta anche in chiave astratta), e forse l’arte astratta è in un certo senso figurativa a sua volta. La pittura gestuale infatti si può anche vedere come estensione del corpo dell’artista.

Matisse affermò “che non c’è arte astratta. Ogni arte è in sé astratta quando è l’espressione essenziale spoglia di ogni aneddoto” e Picasso: “L’arte astratta non esiste, bisogna iniziare sempre da qualche cosa”. Lasciamo stare questo dibattito forse un po’ arretrato. Credo infatti, che, come ha notato il fisico e aforista Georg Christoph Lichtenberg già negli anni settanta del Settecento, che la superficie più dilettevole sulla terra sia quella della faccia umana. E mi sembra che anche nell’arte contemporanea si nota un gran ritorno del viso. Infatti, non sei l’unico pittore a interessarsi della testa. Elizabeth Peyton, giusto per citare solo un nome, ne è proprio ossessionata. Come te … È anche lei si basa su delle fotografie. Di gente che conosce, ma anche di persone famose, artisti, cantanti, scrittori che le hanno ispirate. Potresti spiegarmi, come, per te, partendo da una foto­grafia, il processo di tradurla in pittura, ti permette di appropriartene, di trasformala, di interpretarla? Quanta libertà hai?

Lawrence Gowing scrisse che Vermeer si serviva della Camera Obscura come procedimento artificiale di mediazione, una protezione tra lui e la realtà. Pur con rilevanti differenze, io potrei dire lo stesso di me. Come tu ben sai, io non dipingo ritratti con il modello dal vero, per molti pittori potrebbe sembrare un handicap insormontabile nell’ osservazione diretta della realtà, nella indagine o percezione visiva e oculare nell’esperire il mondo e, nel caso di un soggetto in carne e ossa di fronte a noi, poterlo mettere in posa, osservarlo in molteplici angolazioni, avere maggiore comprensione della sua anatomia facciale, della sua vera struttura fisica della gravità del corpo, etc. Inoltre un altro elemento è la perdita della “cooperazione” o “perfomance” (come la

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chiamò Michael Podro in un suo saggio) tra il soggetto da ritrarre e il pittore che lo ritrae, l’uno influenza l’altro, in un “acting” o dialogo protratto nel tempo, implicito ed esplicito di sguardi diretti o in tralice, movimenti impercettibili, complicità e imbarazzo o perfino gioco erotico, sfida, sdoppiamenti di ruoli, volontà di possesso, domino e sottomissione. Nella mia prassi pittorica solitaria nel mio atelier tutto questo non c’è. Ma credo ci sia una forza diversa, semmai, la presenza “in corpore” di un soggetto afasico che si metamorfizza dichiarandosi subito “Ri-Produzione” o “mise-en-abyme” di una illusione reiterata attraverso la fotografia e la pittura. Da un “vultus” (etimologicamente “apparenza”) o Maschera bidimensionale colta in una frazione di secondo e congelata in eterno in quell’istante temporale a un dipinto che per sua natura specifica vive nel tempo e muta per mezzo del colore, dell’incidenza della luce sullo strato pittorico, etc. Potresti approfondire un po’ cos’è per te “la foto” e tutto ciò che sia legato a questo “medium”?

La scelta di una foto da prendere come “modello” per un mio dipinto scaturisce da molteplici esigenze. In primis, formali, poi intellettuali o psichiche o fors’anche erotiche. Con una boutade, potrei dire che, per un pittore, il suo vero organo erettile e prensile è l’occhio. Cercando di essere più chiaro nell’esporti il mio metodo di lavoro e i miei propositi, io incomincerei a dirimere la questione “Fotorealismo”. Per la stragrande maggioranza delle persone (che, pensando di farmi un complimento dicono di un mio ritratto: “bello, sembra una foto!!”) un ritratto è “realistico” e “vero” nella misura in cui ricopia pedisse­ quamente una fotografia. Nulla di più erroneo. A loro discolpa posso dire che, per convenzione, tutti noi siamo portati a pensare alla fotografia come la fedele trasposizione meccanica della Realtà. I pittori fotorealisti (prendo a esempio Estes, Goings, Close, Bechtle o Salt) suddividono il dipinto in piccoli riquadri da riprodurre e comporre come in un puzzle, piatto, con acribia tecnica nel dipingere ogni più insignificante particolare, con una certa monotonia nella superficie, la pennellata quasi invisibile, un carattere quasi “macchinico” e “impersonale”, “a-sentimentale” …

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E tu invece?

La mia pittura, pur non essendo “espressionistica” in sensu stricto, è l’opposto. A me piace che si veda il ductus della mia pennellata, ma che questa non diventi un espediente decorativo o formale. Poi cerco una certa sintesi nella trasposizione pittorica, senza farne una rielaborazione grafica o fumettistica, s’intende. Studio e guardo i Maestri (si può fare altrimenti?) che in poche pennellate precise e veloci sapevano come dipingere la sostanza gelatinosa del bulbo oculare (Velazquez) o una “carne senziente” (Rembrandt) o l’oscenità molle e rosea di un gluteo femminile (Rubens). La libertà che ho nel trasporre pittoricamente una foto dipende anche dal soggetto stesso e dalla qualità della stampa. Non è un paradosso, ma più la riproduzione e scarsa, più scatta l’invenzione e la risoluzione di quel dato in difetto … Talvolta il caso, l’incidente è la soluzione ottimale. Tutto quello che dici sull’atto tuo di confrontarti con i tuoi “modelli”, mi sembra una chiave utile di lettura dei ritratti dei quali vogliamo ora parlare. Veniamo dunque al progetto stesso, alla “The Visionary Academy of Ocular Mentality”. Prima di entrare un po’ nei dettagli, mi potresti “tradurre” tre termini del titolo? Perché “Visionary” e non “Visual”? “Academy” ‒ che cos’è per te una “accademia”? E poi: “Mentality”: tutti quelli che hai dipinto hanno certo un “concetto”, una “teoria” forse, dell’immagine. Ma una “mentalità”?

Il titolo del progetto The Visionary Academy of Ocular Mentality mi è stato dato da Arthur Danto. Con gli anni, mi ci sono affezionato, sia come pegno tangibile della profonda stima e amicizia che condividevo con Arthur che per la “eufonia” generata nella partitura accostamento delle parole. Alcuni partecipanti hanno obiettato l’ambiguità del senso di un simile titolo, perfino un certo surrealismo e non-sense. Che, detto per inciso, mi va bene lo stesso (un mio omaggio a Max Ernst, forse?) Samuel “Chip” Delany mi ha consigliato di sostituire “Mentality” con “Mentation”, con un sottile e leggero umorismo e spenseriatezza alla “Visionary Academy”. Tutti i miei soggetti ritratti sono a loro modo “visionary” e, la maggior parte, “accademici” o professori in celebri dipartimenti universitari. E innovatori nel pensiero e dibattito teorici contemporanei. “Mentality”, da “mentale” o reazione individuale di

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­ciascun teorico nel vedere il proprio ritratto o “Doppelgänger” in pittura. Poi, avremmo dovuto chiedere a Danto il significato intrinseco del suo titolo … Nella sua ultima email, la sua risposta sibillina: “the Minded-Eye” … Bello. Io, quando lessi il titolo, mi sono fatto l’idea che con “Academy” volevi riferire alla riunione stessa delle persone da te radunate, una “virtual Academy” per così dire, che ti sei allestito là alle sponde de lago di Como ‒ come Paolo Giovio nella sua villa a Borgo Vico. Danto sta quindi un po’ all’origine di questo progetto? Com’è nato?

Il progetto nacque nel 2010 dopo aver incontrato personalmente Arthur nel suo appartamento di Riverside a New York, in occasione della consegna del ritratto che io dipinsi per lui e di un party organizzato assieme a sua moglie Barbara Westman in mio onore, con amici filosofi e artisti. Dopo avermi chiesto della mostra di Matisse al Moma e il mio appuntamento con Thomas McEvilley (io ero deluso di non aver potuto vedere i de Kooning e “18.Oktober 1977” di Richter, per la chiusura di un piano nel Museo), Arthur mi sollecitò a ritrarre altri filosofi e creare una specie di “Galleria Vasariana” o “Accademia” o “Pantheon” della Filosofia Contemporanea. Lui insisteva sui filosofi e mi disse di contattare amici e colleghi come Jerry Fodor, Noam Chomsky, Noel Carroll e altri. Io trovai la sua idea davvero interessante con alcune riserve sulla scelta dei personaggi da ritrarre, io volevo ampliare la mia ricerca anche agli storici e critici d’arte, perfino agli scrittori o poeti che si fossero occupati di arte, anche teorici o studiosi “déplacé” (per usare un termine di Hubert Damisch) al di fuori delle Università o Accademie. Cruciale per me era che ognuno di loro collaborasse al progetto mediante la scelta della foto come modello per il ritratto e, successivamente, un commento o saggio scritto sullo stesso o sulla ritrattistica o altro. In cambio, come “ricompensa” o “potlach” io davo il reale dipinto. Il dialogo via email è stato di grande aiuto, non sarei riuscito a coinvolgere, contattare e dialogare attivamente con tante persone tramite via lettera standard. Credo anche che sia il caso di dire che “The Visionary Academy of Ocular Mentality” è totalmente dissimile per molteplici ed evidenti ragioni e finalità al progetto del fotografo Steve Pyke, “Philosophers”, per il quale Danto scrisse una prefazione …

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Non ti chiederò per quale motivo hai scelto in particolare quello o quella, porterebbe troppo lontano. In fondo bisognerebbe capirlo dai ritratti stessi. E anche dai testi che li accompagnano. E non ti chiedo neanche, perchè non hai incluso quella o quello. Ti chiederei piùtosto: chi ha detto no alla tua domanda? E per quale motivo? Non so se troppo indiscreto. Ma vorresti o potresti fare un nome?

Georges Didi-Huberman fu uno dei primi che contattai per il progetto, ma lui mi rispose molto cortesemente alla mie insistenti richieste: “It is not ‘I don’t like your painting’ – I am not a judge for anything – , it is just I don’t share the kind of problems you are dealing with … Thank you anyway”. Insomma, non era interessato. Poi lo incontrai per caso a Parigi vicino al Centre Georges Pompidou e lo invitai alla mostra “Aesthetic Transactions” curata da Richard Shusterman in uno spazio della Pantheon-Sorbonne, in cui erano esposti un mio dipinto e opere di Carsten Holler, Orlan e altri. Dopo qualche tempo mi diede l’indirizzo di Hubert Damisch, purtroppo il grande storico dell’arte era già gravemente ammalato e io dovetti rinunciare. Inoltre, più o meno per le stesse ragioni, Yves Bonnefoy, Irving Lavin, Paul Virilio e Martin Warnke. Il mio mancato incontro con John Berger per parlare con lui del ritratto … occasione persa per sempre. Per quanto riguarda i rifiuti, io potrei dividerli in due categorie, “tranchant” e poco “simpatetici”, at random, Carlo Ginzburg, Christopher Brown, Jennifer Montagu, Bruno Latour, Jürgen Habermas, Michael Fried, Yve-Alain Bois e Thierry De Duve. E quelli con motivazioni più o meno plausibili, impegni personali e accademici: Peter Sloterdijk, Kaja Silverman, Laura Mulvey, Linda Hutcheon e altri. Un discorso a parte, merita Rosalind Krauss con la quale ebbi un fitto scambio di emails negli ultimi anni. Io dipinsi il suo primo ritratto per “The Anti-aesthetic: Essays on postmodern culture”, da una foto pubblicata su un suo libro. Era l’unica fattibile scelta, perché come lei mi scrisse: “I’m sorry but I don’t have one”. Nessun commento sul mio ritratto. Poi pensai di tentare di farne un altro, prendendo uno stop frame da una delle sue rare interviste filmate. Krauss: “And as for my portrait, sure, go ahead.” E ancora: “Dear Luca, I don’t really understand the project, how will you paint my portrait if I am in N Y?” In breve, il nostro dialogo via email diventò vieppiù assurdo, surreale e pieno di incomprensioni reciproche, una perdita di tempo per entrambi. Esperienza frustrante.

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T. J. Clark partecipò al progetto dopo aver letto il commento del suo amico Mike Davis: “After reading Mike’s wonderful response, I decided I couldn’t go on being so bashful about your project.” C’è anche stato chi ha avanzato scrupoli sostanziali riguardando I limiti della fotografia?

Martha Nussbaum mi dava queste condizioni: “I admire these portraits, particularly the one of Danto. So it is clear that you can do first-rate work from a photograph. Nonetheless, I personally would like any portrait of me to be based on knowing me, seeing me move, hearing my voice, etc. I am a former actress, and all parts of my body are used in communicating my ideas. And I guess the whole personality is just not possible to convey in a photo or photos. You’d just have to see me move before a still image of that movement would be meaningful. Even things such as selection of clothing (I’m well known to be interested in contemporary fashion), color, the color of my nails, all this is part of who I am. So, if you were to be in Chicago and actually meet and hear me, then I’d certainly be interested in that idea, but without that I do not really feel it would work out well. With appreciation for your fine work”. E c’è stato anche chi ha espresso qualche esitazione diciamo “politica”?

Interessante in questo contesto è la reazione/rifiuto di Nicholas Mirzoeff: “With no disrespect, and Italy may be in a different situation, I did notice that all the people selected so far appear to be of white European descent. That’s no problem individually of course. I would hope, though, that our ‘academy’ can be properly diverse and reflect the influence of African, Asian and other non-Western and diaspora cultures on visual thinking. Certainly, for me, it would not have been possible to do the work that I have done without this dialogue. I’d be delighted to suggest some names if you like. Please let me know what you think. It’s your project of course: I’d be happy to be involved if you would feel able to extend the ‘academy’ in this way. Otherwise, I might feel a little cautious about joining … I have thought about this and I think the only solution would be to start a new series – ‘Decolonize the Visual.’ Start with people of color and women and get to people like me later. With

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the spread of white male faces in the current series, it’s too late to correct it, quite honestly. As for wrinkles, if they’re there they’re there. Of course, this is your project and it’s your choice as to what to do, this is just a suggestion. So for the time being I don’t think I should be in the Visionary Academy. I’m hoping that a later project might allow this to happen in the meantime, all the very best” – Le tante risposte ricevute in questi dieci anni di lavoro, potrebbero diventare una bizzarra e utile appendice al libro, magari per una seconda edizione. Alcune di queste osservazioni mi sembrano assai illuminanti. Altre non mi sorprendono, ma credo che sia utile averle sentite, completano a loro modo il progetto. Vorrei chiederti questo: conoscevi la maggior parte dei tuoi modelli dai loro scritti, forse anche da una foto, pochi soltanto di persona. Dopo averli dipinti, dopo di aver ricevuto i loro testi: c’è stata qualche sorpresa? Hai scoperto qualcosa di nuovo in loro, oppure è stato più o meno affermato quello che immaginavi prima, quello che aspettavi?

Ho quasi sempre contattato persone che conoscevo già attraverso i loro scritti, che ammiravo e con i quali mi sarebbe piaciuto dialogare di arte, storia, filosofia e perfino incontrare personalmente. In taluni casi, ho chiesto consiglio (Danto, all’inizio, è stato una fonte inesauribile) ad amici critici o storici dell’arte chi includere nel progetto, ma nella stragrande maggioranza dei partecipanti la scelta è stata solo mia, nel bene e nel male. A un certo punto avevo anche intenzione di estendere il progetto ai registi cinematografici come Godard o Herzog o Seidl (alcuni di loro li ho anche contattati), a scrittori come Cormac McCarthy (che possiede il mio ritratto nel suo Ranch a Tesuque) o Don Delillo e architetti come Norman Foster e Rem Koolhaas, ma poi rinunciai. Come era la “cooperazione”?

Non tutte le persone che ho ritratto (pochissimi li ho incontrati personalmente) hanno avuto per me lo stesso entusiasmo collaborativo, intendo nella scelta della foto come modello sembravano alquanto distratti e il nostro dialogo era pressoché assente o afasico e di conseguenza il loro contributo scritto è stato deludente, quasi il compitino dello studente liceale svogliato. Molti altri, invece, mi hanno insegnato

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molto e si sono dimostrati davvero generosi, pazienti e amichevoli nel rapporto con me. Ognuna di queste persone mi ha sorpreso. Ogni ritratto per me è stata una scommessa e una sfida con me stesso e con loro. Una specie di “Tauromachia” in cui la mia interpretazione di un dato volto (bello o brutto non ha alcuna importanza) si confrontava con la loro idea di come dovevano mostrarsi, apparire, con una “Maschera” pubblica in quanto celebri professori o un volto più intimo, privato, vulnerabile. La loro scelta (forse per diffidenza verso di me o insicurezza o fors’anche egolatria), spesso cadeva su foto ufficiali e un po’ stereotipate scattate da professionisti in cui c’era una “mise-en-scène”, in cui loro recitavano il loro ruolo come attori sul palcoscenico del mondo. Ebbene, il mio ritratto doveva essere l’esatto contrario. Il ritrarre è un atto di conoscenza o “epifania” della persona e io la ­desidero al massimo grado, non riguarda solo la percezione sensoriale e la trasposizione pittorica, qualcosa di molto profondo si innerva tra me e il soggetto, la psiche di entrambi ne è meravigliata o turbata … Ti ringrazio. Vorrei farti un‘ultima domanda. Non è difficile di presagire che molti, che guarderanno il libro, i tuoi ritratti, che leggeranno i testi, accuseranno tutti quelli che hanno collaborato con te di essere vanitosi. Questo è un rimprovero prevedibile quanto superfluo perchè è ovvio. Ma comunque ti chiederei cosa risponderesti tu?

Vanitas Vanitatum et Omnia Vanitas recita l’Ecclesiaste. Chi non lo è? I santi dell’iconografia cristiana? Per me la vanità non è affatto un problema. Preferisco il vanitoso di Genio (e nel libro potremmo trovarne diverse tipologie) all’imbecille vanitoso (per questo basta accendere la TV e guardare i programmi soporiferi o navigare sul web, da YouTube ad Instagram). Guy Debord si sta rivoltando nella tomba. Povero lui. Beati noi nel nostro solipsismo quotidiano da internauti … Vanitosi!!

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Index of portrayed persons

Svetlana Alpers  21 Ernst van Alphen  25 Marc Augé  29 Oskar Bätschmann  33 Mieke Bal  37 Stephan Bann  47 Zygmunt Bauman †  51 Hans Belting  53 Andreas Beyer  55 Harold Bloom †  59 Gottfried Boehm  61 Horst Bredekamp  67 Richard Brettell †  71 Jonathan Brown  77 Norman Bryson  81 Peter Burke  87 Judith Butler  91 David Carrier  95 Noam Chomsky  99 T. J. Clark  101 Karl Clausberg  105 James Clifford  109

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Jonathan K. Crary  115 Simon Critchley  117 Thomas Crow  121 Arthur C. Danto †  125 Mike Davis  133 Ronald De Sousa  137 Samuel Delany  141 Daniel C. Dennett  151 Darby English  155 Johannes Fabian  157 Maurizio Ferraris  161 Christopher Finch  165 Jerry A. Fodor †  169 Hal Foster  171 Nancy Fraser  173 David Freedberg  177 Eduardo Galeano †  185 Ivan Gaskell  187 Stephen Greenblatt  193 Boris Groys  197 Garry L. Hagberg  201 Garry L. Hagberg on Ludwig Wittgenstein  209 Donna Haraway  221 Michael Hardt  225 Michael Ann Holly  229 Andreas Huyssen  233 Timothy Hyman  237 Fredric Jameson  241 Martin Jay  243 David Joselit  247 Martin Kemp  249 Joseph Leo Koerner  253 Jerrold Levinson  259 Marco Livingstone  263 Sylvère Lotringer  269 Edward Lucie-Smith  273 Thomas Macho  277

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Thomas McEvilley  281 Ruth Garrett Millikan  285 W. J.T. Mitchell  287 Keith Moxey  291 Jean-Luc Nancy  295 Alexander Nemerov  299 Michel Onfray  303 Marjorie Perloff  307 Mario Perniola †  311 Steven Pinker  315 Joachim Pissarro  319 Griselda Pollock  325 Paul B. Preciado  335 Jacques Ranciere  341 Franco Rella  345 Amélie Rorty  349 Barry Schwabsky  353 Gary Schwartz  357 Salvatore Settis  363 Richard Shiff  367 Richard Shusterman  375 Iain Sinclair  379 Peter Singer  383 Catherine M. Soussloff  387 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak  395 Barbara Maria Stafford  397 George Steiner †  401 David Summers  403 Gregory L. Ulmer  409 Victor J. Vitanza  413 Kendall Walton  417 Martin Warnke †  423 Peter Weibel  425 Arthur K. Wheelock Jr.  427 John Yau  433 Semir Zeki  437 Slavoj Zizek  445

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This publication was generously supported by the Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History at the University of Texas at Dallas.

Picture credits: Photo: Philipp Hympendahl, p. 422. ISBN 978-3-11-069519-9 eISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-070610-9 Library of Congress Control Number: 2020942056 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Layout and typesetting: hawemannundmosch, Berlin Printing and binding: Beltz Grafische Betriebe GmbH, Bad Langensalza www.degruyter.com